331: Don't Just Stand There and Do Nothing. Look For Work, Because That's Where The Opportunity Is. W/ Ben Milligan Pt.3

0:00:00 - Opening 0:01:20 - By Water Beneath The Walls with Ben Milligan. 3:02:38 - How to stay on THE PATH. 3:11:33 - Closing Gratitude. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jocko Willink?

  This is Jocko Podcast number 331 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo.

• 0:06Ben Milligan?

  Good evening.

• 0:06Jocko Willink?

  Also joining us for the back to back episodes, Ben Milligan, author of the book by Water Beneath the Walls. If you haven't listened to Podcast 330, go back and listen to that one. If you really want to start at the beginning of the Ben Milligan experience, then you gotta go back and listen to 298. Ben Milligan, a former SEAL teammate of mine, who has written this incredible book about, about the history of special operations and how from this convoluted, contorted history,

• 0:44Jocko Willink?

  there ends up being this random group of men from the Navy that become the go anywhere commando of choice for the military. So there you go, Ben.

• 1:03Ben Milligan?

  Well said.

• 1:03Jocko Willink?

  Thanks for coming back, man.

• 1:05Ben Milligan?

  Said better than I could.

• 1:08Jocko Willink?

  So we got barely in three hours on the last podcast. We got through World War II in, in this convoluted crazy story of hits and misses of surfaces and gaps. And we're going to roll into now the post-war period.

• 1:27Ben Milligan?

  Post-war Korea. When I was writing the book, I, I really didn't want to have a book that was half World War II and half everything else, but it's kind of how it ended up.

• 1:39Jocko Willink?

  And now we just end up with a podcast that's half World War II and then half everything else.

• 1:43Ben Milligan?

  I mean, how, how can you not though? Like when I was thinking about it, like I, I cover six chapters on World War II and then there's nine chapters of everything else, but you know, a third of the book is, you know, World War II and you know, justifiably so. And World War II is dwarfs everything else that we've ever. Most horrible war in history and you know, in my World War II section, it covers, you know, six different theaters of operation. So I mean, it makes sense that it would. So I don't feel as bad about it when I set out.

• 2:17Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah. Um, all right. So let's jump into chapter seven, which is the US Navy's post-war plight and the sailor raiders who led her back to significance in Korea.

• 2:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, we'll, we'll continue. You can see we continue, Ben, with his long-winded

• 2:41Jocko Willink?

  chapter titles. So those aren't even subtitles, right? That's the actual chapter title.

• 2:46Ben Milligan?

  Each chapter title is the chapter one. That's the chapter title. And then the subtitle is that.

• 2:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, because, uh, this chapter could have been called, "Chapter Seven: Post-War."

• 2:57Ben Milligan?

  In my defense, I had much tighter chapter titles until my editor got a hold of these.

• 3:02Jocko Willink?

  I like, I like how you're taking ownership of that. I like how you're blaming your editor.

• 3:06Ben Milligan?

  No, you're right. It is, it is not the person's fault. You're right. It is. I haven't liked my chapter titles. And for some of these, I spend more time writing the chapter titles. You imagine trying to compress 30 years of, uh, you know, a chapter into, you know, a single sentence. Like you're just, I mean, you're doing the absolute best that you can to like, one, give your, your reader some idea of what's about to, you know, what they're about to, you know, undertake. But two, you don't want to give away anything. You don't want to say like, I mean, I think the only chapter that I really give away, you know, I, I sort of, I give you, you know, some foreshadowing, you know, the, the raid that wasn't, which is the, the chapter on the, the Rangers. You have some sense that this isn't going to go the way that they think it's going to go. And then two, uh, the, um,

• 3:49Ben Milligan?

  the, the, the, the first chapter on the Raiders, you know, the, the, the, the, the rise and the violent demise of the Navy's first Raiders. You want, you know, you're, you're kind of, you're giving your reader like a little taste of what's about to come.

• 4:05Jocko Willink?

  I, I know I can be a little bit of a, of a, what is it? A dart thrower from the back of the room about your, about your titles and stuff. But as, as I said, and this book is phenomenal. This book is, is.

• 4:22Jocko Willink?

  When I, when I read through this book, um, look, the detail is amazing, but you're a frigging hell of a writer too. It's funny, there's the, the things that you capture, the things that you call out, the dialogue that you've selected. And what's cool is the dialogue that you've selected. This is dialogue that's documented. This isn't like your, uh, author's, you don't do that anywhere in the, you don't do anywhere in the book. Do you do the, you know, this is basically what was said. You don't do that anywhere, do you? It's all, this is what was actually said, recorded in this document.

• 4:53Ben Milligan?

  There's only one time where I, I try to synthesize a conversation. I think, uh, that's when I have two different, I had two documents. Uh, one was Donovan's account of a conversation, uh, and then Miles's account of a conversation. And they both, you know, are sort of like confirming what the other said. Um, that's the only time where I tried to synthesize, you know, two separate conversations. Or there was another time when I was synthesizing, you know, the conversation that, uh, um, Hal and Matt Smith has with Kelly Turner about Tinian. And then there's a third, um, uh, uh, account where, uh, Draper Kaufman is listening in on this conversation. I'm trying to like, do my best to like squeeze these three things into.

• 5:33Jocko Willink?

  Triangulate the different perspectives and try and come up with something that's close to what actually happened.

• 5:37Ben Milligan?

  Essentially like agree with each other though. I mean, it's like, you know, uh, uh, you kind of know when something's true. When it doesn't exactly agree, like if, uh, you know, if you're a platoon commander and, uh, you know, two of your guys, uh, show up for an op and they both have black eyes and you're like, what happened last night? And if they both have the exact same story, you know, they're lying.

• 6:00Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 6:01Ben Milligan?

  You know what I mean? So if there's a slate, if there's, you know, if they both kind of rhyme with each other, but they're not exactly the same. They were just told from a different perspective.

• 6:09Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Well, it's, it's an unbelievable book. It's a fantastic read and it's the kind of book also you can kind of pick up. This is, this is sort of in the vein of About Face, where in About Face, you can pick up that book and you can start to read it. And in four pages, three pages, you go, oh, that's a good little lesson. There's something to think about. And this is this, this is the same way that this book works. Uh, yes, absolutely. You read it from cover to cover. But you have it sitting on your, you know, on your, on your nightstand and. You're not quite tired yet. Open this book up anywhere, read three or four pages and you get a little lesson, a little piece of history and also some kind of a leadership

• 6:50Jocko Willink?

  lesson in there. So phenomenal from that perspective as well. All right, let's jump into this a little bit. So tell me more about the revolt of the admirals. What happened with that?

• 7:06Ben Milligan?

  So after World War II, the Joint Chiefs, or there's a huge budget, you know, cut. I mean, there's nothing's ever happened like World War II. And World War II, like nothing's ever happened like the end of World War II, where, you know, the military, you know, the US military prior to World War II has always had this sort of cycle where they build up to deal with whatever conflict, whether it was the American Civil War, or the First World War, or the Second World War. They grew from sort of a nucleus force to this massive industrial, you know, mobilized, you know, military. And then after it, you

• 7:51Ben Milligan?

  shrink back down to that nucleus force again, so you can rebuild again later. After World War II, the US military or the US public has finally learned its lesson. We can't shrink back. You can't be in this industrial or this era of total war and not field planes and massive ships. You have to keep a residual force afloat and in the air. But there's still, you can't continue to spend what they were spending in World War II. So the military shrinks drastically. So all of the military entities are competing for very limited resources.

• 8:38Ben Milligan?

  Now that all of the, you know, worlds, or all of the United States' enemies have been defeated, the one that still exists is the Soviet Union, and planners don't expect that this is going to be a massive naval effort. The Soviet Union at that point doesn't have a, you know, a particularly big navy or anything like that. We don't anticipate that we're ever going to need to land ships in the Soviet, or land troops on the Soviet Union, because we have this, you know, huge presence in Western Europe. So, planners in the Army and the Air Force are claiming that they need more of the resources, that

• 9:20Ben Milligan?

  the Navy doesn't need resources, because we're never going to have amphibious warfare again. It's just, just not going to happen. Anything that the Navy could have done, all the troops that the Navy could have transported, the Air Force can do it with planes. Or we're already ashore, anyway. So, take the money from the Navy, give it to the Army, give it to, especially give it to the Air Force. So, the Air Force and the Army have convinced, you know, most of the top decision-makers in the Truman Administration, that they're going to, you know, pull money, you know, rob from Peter to pay Paul. Well, the Navy sees this prospect of what is about to be done to them, about to be done to their service.

• 10:03Ben Milligan?

  And not only are they about to lose all of this money and all of this status, but they're about to be sort of declawed. You know, the Navy's not going to be like a force, an offensive warfare force anymore. And the Navy planners are, you know, they're panicking. Not just panicking for their service, but they realize how difficult, how complex expeditionary warfare is, and they're doing everything they can to save their service, and by saving the service, save the country.

• 10:34Ben Milligan?

  So they stage essentially stage a coup. They not a coup, but they they start leaking pressure or leaking stuff to newspaper columnist. I talked about Merritt Merritt Edson, Red Mike Edson. He resigns from his commission in the Marine Corps. So he can get out and start protesting publicly. Eventually, the clamor gets so bad that they have to call a committee hearing in the House in Congress. And it's for several days. It's a it's a big to do like they bring in just about every admiral, every famous admiral

• 11:19Ben Milligan?

  from World War Two to testify in front of Congress.

• 11:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I got a I got a list of names here.

• 11:25Jocko Willink?

  Leahy, Blandy, Nimitz, Halsey, Spruance, Kincaid, Connolly, Carney, Burke, every blue water hero save Kelly Turner, save Kelly Turner Farragut, John Paul Jones.

• 11:40Jocko Willink?

  That is just basically everyone you could, every pipe hitting naval leader goes in and

• 11:50Jocko Willink?

  makes their case, makes their case for not taking all the money away from the Navy and giving it all to the Army and primarily the Air Force.

• 12:00Jocko Willink?

  No other force and no other nation, Denfield proclaimed, could concentrate aircraft like the Navy, could seize advanced bases, could defend those bases, could promulgate undersea and amphibious warfare, could bring to Barrett's underwater demolition teams, its minesweepers, and its radio telephone operators to control air and naval gunfire.

• 12:23Jocko Willink?

  At the conclusion of Denfield's testimony, a red faced, speechless Matthews stood and thundered from the committee room. For a moment, it appeared the Navy had won. Interesting, they even mentioned the underwater demolition teams.

• 12:35Ben Milligan?

  I mean, they're so, I mean, important in the Navy's order of battle at that point that absolutely they're going and, you know, they grew, like you say in the book, they grew from three teams. To forty teams and each of these teams is a hundred, is a hundred guys, plus each one is assigned its own ship. And not only that, but they have assorted, all the, all the protection that each one of these teams requires. Almost each one gets an LCIG gunboat, plus all the battleships that came with that. I mean, the, the UDTs have risen to the front rank of the Navy's amphibious warfare plan. So, but it fails. The whole revolt fails.

• 13:16Jocko Willink?

  And that's that?

• 13:18Ben Milligan?

  Yeah, sort of. I mean, it's that until we go, until a completely unexpected event happens. The North Koreans invade the South.

• 13:29Jocko Willink?

  That's what we always need to be ready for, that unexpected event.

• 13:33Ben Milligan?

  Unexpected event.

• 13:34Jocko Willink?

  That no one, no one anticipates. One of the things that we've been doing as we've been going through this book, the second time here, is talk about some of the characters that you were forced to cut out because of just the prudence and, and, and sympathy for your readers, what you'd like to tell me. Sympathy for the reader, because you would, you could literally make every one of these characters its own book. So, tell me about Louis A. Johnson.

• 14:00Ben Milligan?

  Louis A. Johnson is, I mean, he's, he's a villain out of central casting. He's, I mean, he's a total politician. He's a, I think he's a West, he's a, yeah, I know he is. He's a West Virginia attorney. He's Truman's campaign director in his second campaign for office. His reward for getting Truman a second term is he becomes the Secretary of Defense, a position he's not particularly suited for. He doesn't have a huge military record. He, he did serve in the First World War. I think he was a supply officer. One of the things he did, one of the last things he did when he was still on active duty as

• 14:42Ben Milligan?

  a, as a Navy, or as an Army supply officer is he issued a fairly, fairly scathing report of the, the sort of the Army's logistics efforts. He's always kind of been not an outsider, but sort of a You know, like the guy with the flamethrower, he just, he does not like the institution that he was a part of. He thinks it could be run so much better. And when he sees the, um, the US military, he sees redundancies everywhere. Not just redundancies, but waste, waste, waste. He wants to get rid of all of it. He wants to come in, like I said, with a blowtorch and he wants to, he stops, uh, production of a, an aircraft carrier while it's, I mean, after its keel has already been laid. He's taking money from the Navy and giving it right to the Air Force, almost 400 million dollars in a, in one fell swoop from the Navy to the, to the Air Force.

• 15:28Ben Milligan?

  He is, I, I say, he's a person who never saw an arm without thinking how to twist it. One of my favorite lines from the book, like he was, um, and, uh, yeah. I mean, he's, he's the, he's the, uh, I call it, he's the, he's the, he's the villain of the Navy. He's the, he's the antagonist. He's, uh, he's the guy who sees, you know, the Navy is just a, you know, a waste of manpower, waste of resources. The Air Force can do everything, particularly with, with atomic weapons. Nobody else has them. There's no more war. This is the end of history for a lot of people. They think everything's.

• 16:04Jocko Willink?

  We're, we're, we're done.

• 16:05Ben Milligan?

  Perpetual peace.

• 16:07Jocko Willink?

  You know, it's, uh, when I first got into the Navy when I was a kid.

• 16:13Jocko Willink?

  I, I remember at some point, you know, I got to the team because in BUDs, you're still in boot camp and then BUDs, you're still kind of like isolated to what the Navy actually is and how it actually works. Right? I remember going on my first trip in, at the SEAL Teams and for some reason we had to like get gas for our vehicles. And we had to pay for the gas from the Navy, like, uh, supply depot thing. We had a special card. And I thought, well, you, you think, you think just like, hey man, it's the Navy, like they got gas, it's Navy gas. Like we're in the Navy, they're in the Navy. Hey, cool. Or, oh, we need to fly to some other state. Cool. Well, the Air Force is going to pick us up and then we don't have to pay for that.

• 16:58Jocko Willink?

  They're in the Air Force. We're in the Navy, but we're all in the same big team.

• 17:03Jocko Willink?

  And you realize it's not like that at all. And that's why these budgetary discussions that happen, they're so, you wouldn't think that they would be a thing, but they're, they're the thing. It's not just that they're a thing. They are the thing. And the way this money gets divvied up. And luckily, luckily, it ends up being a, for the most part, a positive sort of competitive cycle of people trying to do good so that they can get more money, which drives better results, right? But, but when you talk about efficiency, like if you were to look at the military just straight up from a pure efficiency, why does the army have boats? Why does the army have helicopters?

• 17:48Jocko Willink?

  Why does the Navy have helicopters? Why does the Marine Corps have fighter jets? Why, you could just say, well, this doesn't make any sense at all. This is all redundant. If you're gonna have one group in charge of the sky, make it the Air Force. You make one group in charge of the ocean, make it the, make it the Navy. Got one group in charge of the land, make it the Army. There's all kinds of efficiencies that you could kind of think and say, yeah, that makes some sense. But the reality is, there's these seams and the seams need to be dealt with and, and then you, you want to have, in a positive way, you want to have the Marine Corps that has fighter jets,

• 18:29Jocko Willink?

  and the Navy has fighter jets, and the Air Force has fighter jets. And the Army, well, they have A-10s. So, I think, close. But, you see what I'm saying? But they all have, No, I mean, you're right. Bradley Fighting Vehicles and, and, you know, armored vehicles. Well, the Army has them, but so does the Marine Corps. And you, you just go down these lists of where these things cross over, where the efficiencies are. And so, this battle that we're talking about, that's a, that's a economic battle for the various forces, is a real thing that needs to be contended with. And, and that's sort of another thing as we go forward, that's going to continue to drive the

• 19:07Jocko Willink?

  SEALs to be coming, to get created. Because as, you know, you mentioned, oh, it seems like World War II was sort of the end of war for some people. Well, if you want to talk about naval battles, Navy versus Navy.

• 19:26Jocko Willink?

  It gets pretty close to saying that World War II is the end of war.

• 19:33Ben Milligan?

  Right, it does.

• 19:34Jocko Willink?

  For the Navy.

• 19:35Ben Milligan?

  And so then what's the Navy doing?

• 19:37Jocko Willink?

  Well, we still had aircraft. Okay, that's cool. But that still is one step back from the people that are on the front lines making things happen. So I just wanted to bring that up from the perspective of where this all goes and how this all plays out.

• 19:56Jocko Willink?

  Ted Fielding, let's deal with Ted Fielding.

• 19:59Ben Milligan?

  Ted Fielding, Mac Boynton, George Atchison, these are all characters that are UDT officers who are are almost lost to history. They are that first rank of frogmen that

• 20:18Ben Milligan?

  I kind of got to go back real quick. So when Korea kicks off, Korea, the geography of Korea, you know, determines a lot. The

• 20:29Ben Milligan?

  Korea is, it's a peninsula. It's accessible, you know, everywhere, you know, on every every coast of it, you know, by naval guns, Navy ships. But the mountains of Korea

• 20:44Ben Milligan?

  kind of preclude, you know, the

• 20:48Ben Milligan?

  highways being, you know, driven or built right down the center of the country. So most of the highways in Korea, most of the railroads in Korea, all like all major traffic is going to go up and down the skins of the country. So on either coast, you know, within 15 miles of the coast, the the major arteries of the country are going to be, you know, established. So when the Inman Gun or where the North Korean Army, when they attack, they they they push the South Korean military and the and the US advisors, they push them into this little pocket, you know, down to the far southeast corner of the country, what we call the Pusan perimeter. And the North Koreans are supplying their forces that are attacking this perimeter,

• 21:32Ben Milligan?

  you know, up and down these railways that are, you know, on the on the flanks of the coast or on the flanks of the peninsula. So. The US military, having disbanded the Army Rangers, having disbanded the Army Ra- or the Marine Corps Raiders, the Marine-backed recon company, all of these special operations units that had been created in World War II, none of these units exist. And all commanders want is to start fielding something that can help cut these supply lines to the North Korean Army. And the first entity to see the opportunity there and to see, you know, the good that they can be doing on that are the commanders in the US Navy. They see these, but they don't have the troops to do it.

• 22:17Ben Milligan?

  And the only troops that are in country that they have are their frogmen, the underwater demolition teams. And they've never done any missions like this. They've never gone ashore. The furthest the UDTs have gone ashore are in Okinawa. Couple of guys went inland to do a handful of things, but nothing serious. So when we get to Korea, because there, you know, there are no Raiders, there are no Rangers, there are the recon, the Marine recon are still on their way to the country, the opportunity falls to the only unit that's there, and that's a detachment of UDT frogmen. And they figure it out. They start going ashore and they start, they do their, they find these railways and they

• 22:59Ben Milligan?

  try to blow them up with the, I mean, the, well, the one thing that the UDT has is a ton of explosives. We got some bombs. We got some bombs. We, I mean, they, I think the first raid that they actually undertake is in Yosu and it's by George Atchison, who's, he's a relatively new frogman. He's not, he wasn't a frogman in World War II, but he's a, he, he, he's become a really good problem solver in his, you know, four-year career in the UDTs. He's one of the, one of the first guys to participate in what's called the sub-ops platoon.

• 23:41Ben Milligan?

  He's, he's started to, instead of being just the frogman who's swimming on the surface, he's, he's perfected lockouts from submarines. He's He's driven underwater submersibles. So he, he is, he might not be a raider, or might not be somebody who's trained in, you know, inland demolition raids, but he is somebody who's adaptable. And he leads one of the first raids ashore to, to blow up a railway, a rail, railway. And those subsequent guys that come in, Fielding, Boynton, they, they only take the UDTs even further.

• 24:12Jocko Willink?

  I'm gonna take it to the book on that one. Below the seawall and out of Atchinson's view, Foley had likewise heard the handcart and was already splashing into the surf, his legs and arms straining against the slow motion of sucking water and the bad dream unfolding behind him. When he reached the rubber boat, he gave a hushed alarm to the crew, grabbed the Tommy gun and splashed back through the surf. Swimmers Limey, Austin and McCormick waiting, waiting behind to keep up. Under the bridge, Atchinson held his breath, waiting for an opportunity. Suddenly, a shadowy figure breasted the seawall and charged the tunnel,

• 24:52Jocko Willink?

  firing a machine gun from the hip. Instinctively, both the North Koreans and Atchinson opened fire at the same target, apparently just in time to hear the figure yelling, "Hang in there, LT, I'm coming!" It was Foley. Whether or not Atchinson realized his mistake, the flash of gunfire unfroze him. Grenade in hand, he pulled the pin and threw it toward the North Koreans. Then he threw another, and another. The sequence of explosions, all of unknown origin, chased the North Koreans back into the tunnel. Glimpsing his moment, Atchinson tore himself from cover and sprinted to the seawall. As soon as he reached the top of the wall, one of the armed swimmers huddled at the bottom, spotted a human head

• 25:37Jocko Willink?

  poking over the lip, and made the same mistake Atchinson had, had, and stitched the wall with fire. One of the rounds tore a hole in the bill of Atchinson's hat. Half a second later, Atchinson identified himself. "You idiots, hold your fire, it's me!" And poked his head over again, then scraped down the wall and onto the rocks. At the bottom, he found the rest of his men. Having rolled himself away from danger and over the seawall, Foley was now alert, but gritting his teeth, shot through the hand and thigh, a kneecap smashed by his fall. Once they were together, McCormick scooped up Foley in his arms and everyone ran for the surf.

• 26:21Jocko Willink?

  That medium, that until this mission, the UDT had always considered the furthest limit of their operations. So that's it. That's the first venture out of the surf zone and on to the land.

• 26:41Ben Milligan?

  Foley goes home, Foley goes to, uh, he's, um, the movie The Frogman comes out a few months later and Foley, who's recently returned from Korea, uh, he goes to the premiere, he's wheeled up in a wheelchair and he gets to meet, you know, Richard Widmark, who's the, uh, the star of the show and everything like that. It was pretty cool. That's one of the few things like, um, that would have been a totally missed, uh, episode had I not gone to the UDT CO museum. That's one of the, like, I'm walking through that thing, I think I know everything. And I walked past a picture of Richard Widmark and Foley, like.

• 27:21Jocko Willink?

  Damn, dude. They kinda did a good job on The Frogman.

• 27:26Ben Milligan?

  They really did, yeah. They, on The Frog, yeah, the movie.

• 27:28Jocko Willink?

  They catch you some good attitudes, right? You're like, oh, I know these guys. The kind of first opening 10 minutes where you're catching the, the attitude of these UDT guys. You're like, oh, I recognize this attitude. I freaking had to hang out with these idiots my whole life. They're pretty cocky, they're just getting after it. Uh, they do a good job with that. So then after you say that Fielding now and Boynton, they start pushing in and continuing to push these operations.

• 27:58Ben Milligan?

  Yeah, it doesn't happen like right away. So they, I mean, when the Marine recon gets in country, the Marine, they create this special operations group or SOG, and it's another one of those sort of entities where the Marines take the front rank of it and the UDT take the subordinate role of just being in charge of the explosives. So the Marines are going to go ashore. They're going to, you know, with guns and everything like that, they're going to clear or provide a perimeter for the UDT to come ashore with explosives, set those explosives onto the railways, and then they escape toward it. Now, they have a couple of these that sort of, that go sideways. A couple of Marines

• 28:41Ben Milligan?

  are wounded badly, one's paralyzed. On the last of these raids, a force of frogmen have to paddle back into shore to rescue their Marine comrades. I think eight of them are hanging out in the water, in water up to their necks because they can't swim. The UDTs have to, they hand them straps on the boats and they just pull them out, back out to sea. But that, but that, it doesn't stop there. So they, this sort of system, the SOG is broken apart not long after. I think they have a three-week operational, you know, lifespan.

• 29:19Jocko Willink?

  Wait, this, the SOG, the special operations group there in Korea, has a three-week operational career?

• 29:26Ben Milligan?

  Yeah, it takes it, it takes it from all the way up to September, right, right when the Incheon invasion happens. Once, after Incheon, you know, that, the imperative to cut the supply lines isn't, it doesn't exist anymore because we've cut the enemy in half. So once, once we take Incheon, the North Korean siege of the Pusan perimeter falls apart. So, that's not to say that UDTs are no longer involved in raids for the rest of the war. What I found, the point of the whole chapter was less about the UDTs and more about the Navy's

• 30:07Ben Milligan?

  Preoccupation with partnering with any force that would be able to provide them raiders. So they partner with the, they create SOG, they partner with Korean partisans, they convince the army to release the Royal Marine Commandos, the 4-1 Commando. They essentially steal the Royal Marines away from the army they're supposed to go serve with the army. Admiral Burke, who's the chief of staff under Turner-Joy, he convinces the army to let him go and creates a one undersea raiding force attached to the USS Perch. But he also just creates a raiding force to partner with his UDTs.

• 30:52Ben Milligan?

  So at every point, all of these entities are, they partner with the US Navy to create coastal raiders. At different points, these, all these units get plucked away, plucked away, pulled away for various reasons, but the Navy sort of in telegraphing its interest, its intent, its desire for its own raiding force. As soon as these groups are pulled away, they partner with another one, partner with this one. They, some, I mean, at every point. And always sort of the common denominator in that process are the UDTs. UDTs never really become like the, they don't become SEALs.

• 31:34Ben Milligan?

  In fact, there are guys like Doug Fane, who writes the book Naked Warrior. He, his position is that, you know, the UDT's future is under the water. We're going, I mean, we, he has no interest in inland combat. And the contemporaneous documents that I found, I mean, several of them are saying that, you know, the, several naval officers are writing that UDTs, the UDT chain of command really does not like doing this. Doesn't, we, I mean, the UDTs would much rather stick to the water. They've only done this as an exigency and we shouldn't rely on the UDTs as an inland raiding force. We need to create something different.

• 32:18Ben Milligan?

  So all the way back in 1953, you can see some reluctance by the UDT, whereas the Navy is sort of pushing the UDT into this, because the UDT, or the Navy realizes there's some real strategic potential here and having a force that can do, that can project this raiding power from the sea.

• 32:36Jocko Willink?

  One of the other forces that we see surfacing to fill this gap again is talked about in Chapter 8. This is the resurrection of the Army's Rangers and the guerrilla raid that failed to forestall their second death. I'm gonna go to the book here.

• 32:57Jocko Willink?

  On November 21, Puckett's Rangers were loaned to Task Force Dalvin. Two battalions of mostly tanks and reconnaissance troops intended to range ahead of the rest of the division. For a unit whose motto in the last war was "Rangers Lead the Way," the promotion from rear guard to skirmishers was an improvement, but still not what had been intended.

• 33:29Jocko Willink?

  On November 24 at 2:00 PM, machine gun fire forced the Rangers off their tanks and into the scrub. From the Valley 4, Puckett led a daytime attack to Seashore Hill 224, during which one Ranger was mortally wounded. In the chaos, TF Dalvin's tanks fired on Puckett's men, killing two and wounding six. The next day, during TF Dalvin's phased movement north, enemy fire again opened up on the column, this time from behind. Realizing they were suddenly surrounded, the Rangers bundled off the tanks into the middle of a frozen rice paddy and sprinted uphill 205. Enemy fire wounded three more Rangers and convinced one of Puckett's two platoon commanders

• 34:12Jocko Willink?

  to desert the company and hide in the Valley Command Post. As darkness fell, the Rangers clawed out frozen foxholes amid the hills' emaciated pine trees, and Puckett scratched down an artillery support plan. His roster numbered 58 souls.

• 34:33Jocko Willink?

  At around 10pm, the sound of drums, whistles, and bugles rattled the night's silence. A moment later, a cascade of sparks crackled forth from the slope below, followed by the hard thud of mortars and grenades, then a wave of attackers in tan, winter-padded uniforms. The fight that followed was not one the Rangers had been promised. Under the ghostly loom of waning red flares, the men fought from the lips of foxholes like trench soldiers, relying on artillery to splash their slope clean.

• 35:11Jocko Willink?

  As with rising tides, every wave inched closer and eroded a bit more. Bullets, grenades, courage, men.

• 35:21Jocko Willink?

  After five hours and five waves, no Ranger had more than a few rounds left.

• 35:28Jocko Willink?

  Any man who had not already done so fixed his bayonet.

• 35:33Jocko Willink?

  Then came the sixth wave. Shot through the chest with shrapnel in his shoulder, Puckett ducked into the bottom of his foxhole, wrapped white knuckles around his radio handset, cupped the receiver close to his mouth, and begged for another salvo of artillery. The response: "Get in line."

• 35:54Jocko Willink?

  A half-second after Puckett's last transmission, two mortar shells exploded next to him, killing his remaining West Point classmate and peppering holes from his feet to his shoulders. When he woke up, he laughed.

• 36:10Jocko Willink?

  There was nothing else to do.

• 36:13Jocko Willink?

  All around, Puckett's men either snaked down the hill or fought to the death. "Holy Mary of Goddamn this rifle!" one Catholic Ranger was heard to curse as he wrenched open his frozen bolt. The last report of Wilbur Clanton, one of the US Army's first Black Rangers, was the unmistakable sound of him roaring in rage as he charged a cluster of enemy troops with an empty rifle.

• 36:42Jocko Willink?

  He was never seen again. Three privates first class nearly made it to the valley floor when they were stopped not by the enemy, but by the wind that fills their sails of bravery, their duty. Past looters and battlefield executioners, the three stalwarts crept over scrub and bodies until they found Puckett, alive but reeling on his hands and knees.

• 37:11Jocko Willink?

  As they dragged him away, he was heard muttering the same thing over and over, "I'm a Ranger, I'm a Ranger." Months later, McGee would pen a letter to Puckett in the hospital commending him and the Eighth Army Rangers for carrying forth the fullest interpretation of duty, honor, and country.

• 37:33Jocko Willink?

  This personal satisfaction of doing the job concluded McGee is the highest and often the only reward of a soldier.

• 37:42Jocko Willink?

  In the entire letter, McGee betrayed not a trace of bitterness at the Rangers' misuse.

• 37:49Jocko Willink?

  Of Puckett's 57 men who started the battle on Hill 205, 17 were wounded and 11 killed, their bodies destined for the same fate as those at Sosterna. The enemy was estimated to have numbered around 600, and they were not North Koreans. With some 300,000 troops, China had entered the war.

• 38:20Ben Milligan?

  Ralph Puckett was just, well, not just, but a year ago, two years ago, he was awarded the Medal of Honor.

• 38:28Ben Milligan?

  His Distinguished Service Cross was upgraded.

• 38:30Jocko Willink?

  Upgraded.

• 38:35Ben Milligan?

  I've always wondered what happened to the three that rescued him. If they were appropriately honored. That's no small thing to creep back up that hill with the Chinese soldiers.

• 38:47Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that's crazy. And is this the raid that failed to forestall their second death?

• 38:57Ben Milligan?

  No, that's not. So this is, that's an example of kind of the Army's misuse of the Rangers. So, again, yeah, the Eighth Army Rangers are created in-country. They're created by John McGee, who's the central character of this book. He was a prisoner of war. He fought at baton. He was a prisoner of war for most of World War II. He escapes, and he tries, anyway, he tries to create a partisan force, fails to do that in World War II. But this is his second chance. And so, he is ordered to explore the idea of creating a partisan force at the beginning of the Korean War.

• 39:41Ben Milligan?

  He doesn't find an opportunity there for that, but he does establish an idea for the Rangers. At the same time he's doing this, the Army, back in the United States, is also getting the idea to reconstitute the Rangers. So there's sort of two parallel things that are happening. One, there's the Eighth Army Rangers that, back in the United States, they're back at Fort Benning. They're recreating the Ranger Company model. But nobody really up top is thinking about how to employ these Rangers. And one, how to like create a command to, you know, make sure that the Rangers do Ranger missions. So, once these Rangers are created...

• 40:24Ben Milligan?

  Unfortunately, all of these Ranger companies get attached to divisions. Once the divisions have them, they don't really know what to do with them, so they just treat them like regular infantry. So they've been trained for, you know, these behind the lines raids. Only a couple of behind the lines raids happen. So what, the only thing that could have really forestalled that second death would have been a raid that showed the potential of these Rangers. And the raid that could have done that, that almost succeeds, is the Virginia One raid, which is sort of a combination of McGee's partisan entities and his Ranger entities.

• 41:03Ben Milligan?

  He creates this Ranger-led partisan mission to sneak 25 miles behind enemy lines to a inland mountain tunnel, to destroy that tunnel, to cut the enemy's supply lines. And as you'll find in the book, it's a complete disaster.

• 41:20Jocko Willink?

  And was it, how was the research on that? Did you run into some issues with the research?

• 41:25Ben Milligan?

  Yeah, it was a tough, it was a tough one to research. It was a, I knew that this, this was the raid that, you know, I knew that I wanted to cover, in part because it did so many things. It did so much work for me. It combined, you know, these sort of two wings of the Army's, one, their reconstitution of the Rangers, but also the Army's, you know, interest in partisan or guerrilla operations into a single mission. But I couldn't find a ton on this. I had communicated with a guy who had formerly served with McGee in the partisan command who'd written a book on this mission, Ed Evanhoe.

• 42:06Ben Milligan?

  I talked to his son, got notes that his dad had used to write his book. It wasn't until I was doing my research for, or research, I came across a POW report for McGee. So McGee had been a POW in World War II, and I knew that one of the members, the Virginia One raid, had also been a POW. So knowing these POW reports existed in the archives, I did a FOIA request to see if there was a POW report of similar length for Martin Watson.

• 42:44Ben Milligan?

  Now, the POW report that I had for McGee was like two pages long. I anticipated that I'd have a two-page report for Martin Watson as well. After waiting a couple of months, I finally got an email back saying, "Yes, we have the report." I was like, "Great, can you email me the copy of the report?" It's like, "No, it's in another report. It's about 750 pages long." I was like, "Well, can you just pull Martin Watson's section out?" And they said, "No, it's 750 pages." I was like, "Okay, right. Clearly, there's a miscommunication here. I'll get it the next time I'm in Maryland." Next time I was in Maryland, I spent a whole day researching something else. I had moved on from the Virginia One raid. I was like, "I'm never going to find anything on this.

• 43:26Ben Milligan?

  I'm going to have to recalibrate, come up with something else that shows what I'm trying to show." End of the day, I was like, "Oh, yeah, there's that Martin Watson POW report." So, I requested it. They wheeled it out in the box. I opened the box, I pull it open, there's this huge binder, and I'm expecting to leaf through it and find the Martin Watson section of this POW report. When, in fact, every single page in this 750-page collection of papers is all about Martin Watson and the Virginia One raid. It wrote the chapter for me. Everything was there.

• 44:01Jocko Willink?

  Let me go to the book on Martin Watson, because this guy's... Well, he's Martin Watson. Raised in Hartford, Connecticut's Frog Hollow District by the competing Lash Stripes of an Irish Catholic Diocese, a German grandmother, and local French bullies, Martin R. Watson, red-haired, fair-skinned, and small, had survived by learning the languages of each group, by building his body until his back was the size of a dinner table and his legs could not fit into store-bought swim trunks, and by joining up with a gang of local Irish toughs who were destined for the usual options of East Coast Irish destiny: law enforcement

• 44:45Jocko Willink?

  or crime. With 75 arrests by the time he was 19, the last one requiring seven police officers to detain him, Watson's future would have undoubtedly been the latter if the Japanese had only stayed on their island. A member of Darby's first Ranger Battalion since North Africa and thus a veteran of blazing heat, bitter cold, three amphibious landings, and more than a few mountaintop Alamos, Watson and his Echo Company platoon had been among the few groups to reach Sisterna's outskirts. There, with all hope lost, Watson, at just 21, had volunteered to stay behind to cover

• 45:30Jocko Willink?

  his squad's retreat, a sacrifice that resulted in humiliation in the streets of Rome, followed by 15 months at Stalag 2B, situated on the northeastern fringe of the Reich, and known above all for its cruelties.

• 45:50Jocko Willink?

  Watson had responded to captivity by murdering the camp commandant's German shepherd, and by attempting so many escapes that the guards had nicknamed him "The Hace," German for "rabbit." Upon liberation, Watson had vowed that he would never be a prisoner again. It was a promise his personality was only to keep for just five months, whereupon he was jailed for 30 days in East Hartford for inciting a riot and resisting arrest, crimes that preceded six more similar episodes: breach of peace, assault, intoxicated assault, and assault and battery of a police officer.

• 46:34Jocko Willink?

  Sorry, man, this guy's a freaking maniac. For the last charge, Watson would have faced as much as nine months in jail, had he not re-enlisted in the Army, then re-volunteered for the Rangers. At that interview for the Virginia 1 mission, McGee had seen in Watson a man physically distinct from the others: at 6'4", 240 pounds, a chin haped like a fist, hands the size of country hams, a reddish-brown Cadillac mustache with ends as sharp as tomahawks. The real difference in Watson, however, had lain just below his eyebrows, a gaze so comfortable and confident that he looked 15 years older than his 27 years suggested.

• 47:20Jocko Willink?

  There was only one issue. Imposing, experienced, eager, a preternatural fighter. Watson had ended World War II with a rank of T5, Technician 5th Grade, essentially a corporal. In the five years since, he had advanced not a single rank. A fact that belied his leadership potential, which was ample, but spoke volumes about his exposure to a military leader's responsibilities, from mission planning to command and control.

• 47:58Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, as you mentioned, he ended up getting captured again.

• 48:02Ben Milligan?

  He gets captured again. He, um, not before he manages to get all three of his Ranger comrades safely evacuated. He winds up, um, uh, escaping from the mountaintop, uh, you know, Alamo that they fight their way off of. A Navy pilot had crashed, so it's him, a Navy pilot, and six Korean partisans, and they are making their way, uh, something like 87 miles to the coast, and they, or not to the coast, to friendly lines. And the Navy pilot gets captured, uh, most of the Koreans get captured, only Watson gets captured, I think, uh, two miles from friendly lines, almost makes it.

• 48:46Ben Milligan?

  Uh, and the two Koreans that do make it back to friendly lines, uh, they ultimately are discovered that they had only made it back, uh, because they agreed to spy for the North Koreans, and they are executed.

• 49:04Jocko Willink?

  I'm gonna fast forward a little bit.

• 49:07Jocko Willink?

  On July 27th, 1953, the armistice that effectively ended the Korean War was signed, and within days, the Chinese and North Koreans began publishing daily lists of UN prisoners of war earmarked for release. For a printing press operator at the New York Times who received each list directly from the front, this initiated a nightly series of breath-holding, paper-clutching searches through line after line of names, not one of them belonging to his son, of whom he had no, had had no information for two years, five months, and 26 days.

• 49:48Jocko Willink?

  So this is Watson's old man.

• 49:50Ben Milligan?

  Yeah.

• 49:51Jocko Willink?

  After thirty-two nights of this routine, and having recently been informed that only one more list of one hundred and ten names remained to be published, this father left his coworkers and his post behind and made for the Connecticut Shore to be alone. There, hours later, he was found by local police and informed that the North Koreans had, at the last minute, added a hundred and eleventh name to their final list. A name the local police knew all too well. In the twenty-nine months since his capture, Corporal Martin R. Watson, a soldier no guard or prisoner believed was actually a corporal, had set an example for captivity that to this day has never been exceeded.

• 50:37Jocko Willink?

  Thirty days after he was captured, for eighteen of which he had been starved in a cave to make his two-hundred-and-forty-pound size somewhat easier to handle, Watson and a South Korean comrade had knocked out a guard with a rock and made for the surrounding mountains where they survived for five days until their pursuers had disabled them by rolling a grenade into their hideout. Never medically treated, except with some shreds of brown paper to cover his wounds, Watson had nevertheless escaped again, this time by wriggling out of his rope restraints and jumping free of a moving truck as it slowed around a bend. This time he survived a week before inadvertently walking right past a wide-eyed North Korean patrol. For these attempts, and one other,

• 51:22Jocko Willink?

  plus an attempted suicide with a broken piece of glass, he had been relentlessly beaten with rifle butts and boot heels and periodically starved and almost always isolated, once in an unsheltered hole for seventy-two days with rations described by the record as sparse.

• 51:42Jocko Willink?

  Rightly suspected as an OSS spy and saboteur, Watson had also been subjected to almost daily interrogation by the North Koreans, the Chinese, even the Russians, who had drilled him on his exposure to the Gestapo in World War II, but especially on the organization's methods and tactics of the paratroop unit to which they knew he had belonged. Watson's response to these and other questions had been a mixture of stony silence or intentional contradiction, responses that had invariably earned him a switch across the eyes, a pistol barrel across the face, or hours of kneeling with his nose pressed against a wall and a stone on his head.

• 52:25Jocko Willink?

  Throughout these deprivations, Watson never lost his bearing nor conviction. Once, standing during a packed camp lecture by a British speaker from the London Daily Worker, to say that he "didn't know what communism was and didn't care to find out," nor did he and his fellow POWs want to listen to this trainer commie son of a bitch.

• 52:54Jocko Willink?

  For this affront, and as his example to other prisoners, he was eventually frogmarched before a military tribunal, informed of the armistice, then sentenced to death by firing squad. He still didn't talk.

• 53:09Jocko Willink?

  In the end, after having been starved from 240 pounds to 120 pounds, his was an example that earned him the final distinction as the second-to-last UN POW to be released across the Freedom Bridge.

• 53:27Jocko Willink?

  On the other side, he learned that the Rangers he had so steadfastly protected from exposure

• 53:34Jocko Willink?

  no longer existed.

• 53:41Ben Milligan?

  I have a hard time listening to that part about his dad still. I found that newspaper article and I don't think any dad can read that without getting choked up. But not just that, I mean, every, I mean, all 750 pages of that document, it was all there and you just do your best to compress, compress, compress, get as much in there as possible because nobody else is writing about this guy. You know that you, I mean, at least I suspected, you know, this guy's lost to history.

• 54:15Jocko Willink?

  Well, last time you were on and we talked about this, actually, the first time you were on and we talked about this, I said, "That's the next book," right? Like, take those 750 pages, get it down. Let's chop it down to, you know, 500.

• 54:28Ben Milligan?

  Yeah, there'd be problems to do that, but I think you're right.

• 54:32Jocko Willink?

  What would be the problems? Because I'll just go and photocopy that thing and publish that right there.

• 54:37Ben Milligan?

  No, no, no, it's not that. It's the way that the documents are lined out. It's a... Each one of these things, or each of that 750 pages, all of these are... Most of the things in there are interviews with inmates.

• 54:48Jocko Willink?

  Other inmates.

• 54:49Ben Milligan?

  Other inmates, and there's no chronology to them. So, what I've done, which is a... I mean, it's kind of a wrap-up or like a montage of things. That's the best I could do, considering the timeline that I had available to me. But what else is not in there? I mean, the entire epitaph for Martin Watson is, you know, what comes after the war? And that's, you know, what comes after the war for so many of these guys. You know, I've talked to, you know, a number of his, you know, family members, and it's tragedy.

• 55:28Ben Milligan?

  I mean, though he survives the war, and, you know, he comes back and, I mean, he's honored, you know, he's not sufficiently, I don't think... I mean, if there's anybody in the book that, you know, is a deserving military member of the Medal of Honor, it's Watson. I think he was... I know he received a Silver Star for that, which I think is completely insufficient. But what happens after the fact is, you know, he comes back to a wife, comes back and he has children, and he's not capable of managing that. Ultimately, he is... Because of his demons, he leaves his family, escapes to Alaska, and, you know, works on

• 56:11Ben Milligan?

  an oil pipeline for years. Only sees his son, I think, two dozen times, you know, after he leaves. Gets cancer and dies, I think, when his son is about 12 years old. One of the last memories that his son has of him is in the hospital bed. He's completely... He's shrunk from, you know, this monster of a man that he used to be into, you know, this emaciated figure. And every time his son would come to the hospital to see his dad, his dad, the password that he had to knock or that he had to give before he came into the hospital room was courage.

• 57:02Jocko Willink?

  So, again, unbelievable detail in here. Although you did, you did mention there's a raid that you've cut from the book.

• 57:16Ben Milligan?

  Yeah, the Huichang Dam raid.

• 57:17Jocko Willink?

  On the Huichang Dam, what was that all about?

• 57:19Ben Milligan?

  So, the Huichang Dam raid is, it's another failed attempt. It's probably the one. If, if the Virginia One raid wasn't, wasn't the raid that would have convinced Army planners that, you know, the Rangers had a purpose to play in this, in this conflict, then it was the Huichang Dam raid. And that was a, it was happening almost at the exact same time as the, as the Virginia One team was escaping south along the peninsula. But it was, it was a, that was not well planned, but it was a, it was supposed to be a raid

• 58:04Ben Milligan?

  on, to seize a dam from the North Koreans or from the, from the Chinese that were holding it. And they had to row across a lake, they, they had to collect, you know, what, what little boats that the Army had. I mean, within 24 hours, they, they threw this thing together and the Rangers had to paddle secretly across, land on an enemy shore, and then climb up a mountain to try and get around this dam. And in the process of that, they're contacted by a sort of a redout, you know, that was positioned well away from the dam. They didn't even get close to the dam. So, before, you know, the morning is even out, they can't, they can't retreat, they can't advance, they can't receive supplies.

• 58:48Ben Milligan?

  Eventually, they are, another force comes and relieves them and rescues them, but the raid itself is, is a disaster. It's not until later that the dam is actually pummeled by Navy, Navy fighter, fighter bombers that the raid is dismantled or taken.

• 59:11Ben Milligan?

  But that was the one raid I thought, you know, if I couldn't do the Virginia one raid, and I couldn't show how the Army, you know, had turned its back again on this raider concept, then it would have been the Waichon Dam raid. It's, you know, equally, you know, dramatic and it's equally important. It's just one of those things, you have to make a choice as, you know, as a historian, what are you going to focus on? You've got to, you know, keep moving your reader into the next, you know, you don't want to just jam them up in Korea, you've got to keep, keep moving forward, so.

• 59:42Jocko Willink?

  And so ultimately, we end up leaving the Korean War with still no real commando unit.

• 59:49Ben Milligan?

  Correct.

• 59:49Jocko Willink?

  And, um, moving in, past the, past the Korean War into Chapter 9, Arlie Burke, the Bay of Pigs, and the launching of the Navy's limited war SEALs. And I'm going to the book on this. "Proposed as separate and distinct from the fleet's UDTs, the recruits for the new, for the two new SEAL teams, one on each coast, would, like Adam's rib, be drawn from them. Ten officers and fifty enlisted men per team, all graduates of the training first conceived for the scouts and raiders, then modified by Kaufman for the NCDUs.

• 1:00:34Jocko Willink?

  The specialized training needed to create the SEALs, said the memo, would occur at existing Army and Navy schools, or could be added to the present UDT curriculum as required. Before long, rumors of a naval commando unit began to hover so thickly above the UDTs that many took the clouds for smoke of their own making. It would require another six months of CNO-level conversations, meetings, and memoranda to allocate funding, to carve out basing, to hammer out organizational plans and chains of command, to purchase commercial watercraft and fund new research for silent motors, to

• 1:01:16Jocko Willink?

  resurrect six mothballed APDs from retirement, to study the country of South Vietnam, and there to embark on a type of riverine warfare, said one memo that the Navy had not seriously attacked since the war between the states." And at the end of that six months, the Navy would quietly, without any ceremony, commission SEAL Team One on Coronado Island in San Diego and SEAL Team Two at Little Creek in Virginia Beach.

• 1:01:52Jocko Willink?

  So this is, we're starting to get to that culminating point.

• 1:01:56Ben Milligan?

  Yeah, they, um, I mean, the, I mean, you touch on the controversy there. Like the, there's this whole period, um, after the SEAL teams are created where guys start coming out of the woodwork to say, this was my idea. I did this. I'm the one that wrote the memo. All right. Let's see it. Let's see the memo, you know? Roy Bohm, who was, uh, he wrote an entire book called The First SEAL. I mean, he, he makes the case that it was him that put this thing together and he based, you know, his idea, uh, in part off of, uh, Mary

• 1:02:37Ben Milligan?

  Miles's book, A Different Kind of War. Different Kind of War didn't come out for five years after, after when the SEAL teams are created.

• 1:02:45Jocko Willink?

  Oh.

• 1:02:45Ben Milligan?

  So to, to use Mary Miles is like, his book is the, anyway. Um, but yeah, there, I mean, there's a

• 1:02:53Jocko Willink?

  Oops.

• 1:02:54Ben Milligan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:57Ben Milligan?

  But, you know, it's this whole thing. None of this would have happened without, like we talked about in the, the last episode, not without the effort, without the foresight of Burke. And, um, you know, there were lots of, uh, lots of, you know, folks in, in the UDTs that they had no interest in, in going in this direction. There were some that did. I mean, there was a, there was a contingent of folks and, and like I talked about, Fielding, Boynton, uh, Atchison, there were guys that had, uh, experienced those, uh, you know, those raids in the Korean War and they knew that there was something, more that they could be doing. Um, but I don't think anybody in the UDTs was proposing this, this, uh, this, this force, this go anywhere force. Uh, and the, and the, and the, the idea that this

• 1:03:42Ben Milligan?

  would be a go anywhere force. It's, it's there in the, in the original name. I mean, nobody had really thought that, you know, they were going to be creating this capture-kill commando for it, but they had thought of that go-anywhere capability. And that's there from the beginning, that sea, air, and land capability.

• 1:03:59Jocko Willink?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:04:00Ben Milligan?

  And that was all derived from this series of committees and, you know, memoranda and meetings that Burke had convened with his senior staffers. And they had pulled that from all the ideas they'd been collecting from the fleet. They'd been interviewing and talking and having people write white papers and just develop ideas. And, I mean, the one, you know, genius of Burke is that he realizes he's not a genius. He's pulling ideas from every place he can possibly get them. So when, you know, these guys say that it was my idea, you know, I'm not necessarily, you know, so confident that they didn't, you know, send these memoranda. We just don't have them. We don't, I mean, there's only one person who's responsible for that, you know, final

• 1:04:44Ben Milligan?

  establishment, and that's him.

• 1:04:46Jocko Willink?

  Him?

• 1:04:47Ben Milligan?

  Burke.

• 1:04:48Jocko Willink?

  The strange thing about this is, you know, when you say, "Well, there's a lot of UDT guys that were sort of like, 'Hey, we don't want to do that.'" And if you were to, if you were to ask, probably the entire time that I've been, that I was in the SEAL teams, up until today, the percentage of people that, if you gave them the choice of what type of operation they wanted to conduct...

• 1:05:17Ben Milligan?

  Yeah, right.

• 1:05:18Jocko Willink?

  You know where I'm going with this, right?

• 1:05:19Ben Milligan?

  This is the puzzle.

• 1:05:20Jocko Willink?

  Like, everyone would, would say, "Hey, we want to be on land. We want to push into the land. We want to push into the hinterland. We want to..." It's, "Is it cool to come over the beach? Hell, yeah, it is. It's awesome. But we want to go over the beach. We want to get from the water to the land." That's where the, the cool things are happening. It's interesting to think that...

• 1:05:44Jocko Willink?

  It's, it's interesting to think that you would, back in the day, like I know, if it wasn't, if it wasn't for the SEAL teams, if I didn't see pictures of freaking guys dressed up like commandos with machine guns in Vietnam, I never would have joined the Navy, ever. Not in a million years.

• 1:06:02Ben Milligan?

  If you had only seen a picture of a guy in swim trunks with a dive knife.

• 1:06:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:06Ben Milligan?

  I mean, yeah, was that as?

• 1:06:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, what is that? What are you doing?

• 1:06:09Ben Milligan?

  I don't know, but the, the thing is like, everybody who, you know, joined the SEAL teams in that era, that's what they were joining for. They weren't joining because of the SEAL teams. Nobody knew what the SEAL teams were. It wasn't until, you know, they got there and they were like, oh, there's this other thing?

• 1:06:21Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:21Ben Milligan?

  Like Mike Thornton, Tommy Norris, Pete Peterson, Bob Gallagher, they didn't join the SEAL teams. They joined the UDTs.

• 1:06:27Jocko Willink?

  They joined to be UDTs.

• 1:06:29Ben Milligan?

  Yeah, and, you know, regardless, they, they created this institution.

• 1:06:34Jocko Willink?

  The other thing that's interesting about this is, when you think about the senior leadership in the, in the Navy, including Burke, being on a ship off the coast, unless you're in World War II and you're getting attacked by kamikazes, being in a ship off the coast of combat is, is totally, it's a world away. If you're in a ship off the coast of a combat zone, you are a world away from combat. Like I said, unless you're in World War II and there's freaking kamikazes coming at you, God bless you. But if you're not in World War II?

• 1:07:11Ben Milligan?

  Or whatever this next war is gonna be.

• 1:07:12Jocko Willink?

  Or whatever this next war is gonna be, possibly. Uh, yeah, you're, you're, you're in a different scenario. So it's interesting to think that, that the, that the senior leadership thought, let us get involved in that. Let us, the Navy, get involved in that stuff over there, over the horizon, onto the land, where there's bullets and bad guys and snakes, right? It's, you would think part of the Navy would say, hey, look, that's not really our business. That's not our thing. We're staying our lane over here. We'll get you to the beach. You take it from there.

• 1:07:51Jocko Willink?

  So, if, if it wasn't for this void that the Navy had seen over and over and over again, where they couldn't get someone to do what we needed them to do, the Navy couldn't get commandos to do what they needed commandos to do.

• 1:08:06Jocko Willink?

  Anybody could have stepped into this role.

• 1:08:07Ben Milligan?

  Anybody could have. And, and, uh, um, when, when I look back and, and, you know, you can almost use the, uh, example of aviation, uh, as, as a counter to my, you know, whole thesis. You could say like, um, well, you know, just because, you know, the army and the marine corps had failed to do this, doesn't mean the navy wouldn't have, you know, uh, done this as well. I mean, you could have had the rangers, uh, you could have had the green berets, you could have had all of these entities and the navy still would have created the seal teams. And I say that's, I don't think so. And, and the reason I, I, I think that that's wrong is because of all these episodes of the navy, uh, attempting to partner time and time again.

• 1:08:51Ben Milligan?

  Like the navy is, is constantly saying, we will support you. We will, just let us partner with something. Stop, you know, taking this away from us. Because all through the Korean War, all through World War II, you know, the navy is sponsoring various commando units. So I don't, I mean, I, I think that argument, um, it's not an argument that's been made back to me, but it was always an argument that I was thinking about when I was writing this book. Like to confirm, you know, to, to sort of, you know, means test my, my own thesis. Like, none of this would have happened without that neglect. But it also would not have happened without that, um, uh, with, without that mentality, uh, that Burke had. So it was a combination of two things, you know?

• 1:09:34Ben Milligan?

  It was, yes, it was the neglect of the army and the marine corps, but it was also, you know, not just neglect, it didn't just create that space. It was also, you know, you have this person who's, um, you know, this, this person of Burke who, you know, can't stomach a navy that is not connected to combat. And if those two things hadn't collided, there would not be a SEAL team.

• 1:09:58Jocko Willink?

  Here's a hypothesis. And I don't know how this is gonna land, but I'm taking a shot at it. The water?

• 1:10:11Jocko Willink?

  The water sucks for operations. It completely sucks for operations. It ruins your weapons, it ruins your radios, it makes you cold, it can kill you. The water absolutely sucks for operations. And throughout all of these opportunities for all these other units to say, "Hey, we got this." I, it seems like at least, it might have been a little bit of a factor, just a little tiny bit of a factor. For everybody. When the big Navy says, "Hey, we need somebody that can stay in the water and also go up on that." Everyone goes, "Hey, we'll just take the land part over here."

• 1:10:53Jocko Willink?

  They go, "Oh, we'll give it a try, but then damn, that sucked." We were freezing, our weapons didn't work, we lost two guys that drowned, right? That's what happens.

• 1:11:03Ben Milligan?

  And there's no enemy there.

• 1:11:04Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:11:05Ben Milligan?

  What do you want us to do back there? I mean, yeah, there's some things that maybe you want us to blow up from time to time. And, you know, you may want us to figure out how deep the water here is, but, you know, the... I mean, a lot of us just, you know, the, you know, like that, you know, the whole, the whole gap of the admirals, or the revolt of the admirals, I mean, they want to prove they're relevant. Everybody wants to be relevant. And institutions are just collections of people. And, you know, institutions are going to make themselves relevant, whether it's in the market or with government agencies. I mean, we are, we're gonna find opportunities. Or you're gonna, if there are no opportunities, you're gonna make them.

• 1:11:46Ben Milligan?

  And you're not, I mean, everybody wants to earn their paycheck and feel like they've done something. I mean, if there's nothing to do, well, you're gonna find it.

• 1:11:55Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, we're gonna find something.

• 1:11:59Jocko Willink?

  You talked about Burke's CNO ceremony a little bit when we kicked this thing off. I mean, were you gonna?

• 1:12:05Ben Milligan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:06Jocko Willink?

  What else were you gonna say about that?

• 1:12:08Ben Milligan?

  Uh, the whole chapter had started. I found, uh, I actually found Burke's CNO ceremony on YouTube. I don't know how many times I watched it. I mean, I don't, like, I don't know how many-

• 1:12:19Jocko Willink?

  This is when he became CNO?

• 1:12:20Ben Milligan?

  Yeah, there's a-

• 1:12:21Jocko Willink?

  That's on YouTube?

• 1:12:22Ben Milligan?

  That's on YouTube.

• 1:12:23Jocko Willink?

  Damn.

• 1:12:24Ben Milligan?

  And, I mean, I think there's, you know, uh, 500 views. I'm responsible for 485.

• 1:12:31Jocko Willink?

  How long is it?

• 1:12:32Ben Milligan?

  It's like, well, I mean, they, they compress it. It's like, uh, um, and I think there's a couple of different versions of it, but, uh, maybe 30 minutes.

• 1:12:41Jocko Willink?

  Okay.

• 1:12:41Ben Milligan?

  But there's different speakers and everything, and I'm, I'm watching this thing like time after time. I remember watching this thing like, you know, in the middle of the night, like, you know, I'm not doing anything bad. I'm watching, I'm watching 50-year-old Navy CNO, uh-

• 1:12:57Jocko Willink?

  Did he give a powerful speech or something?

• 1:12:59Ben Milligan?

  No, his speech is terrible. He's not a good speaker. He's sort of choppy. Uh, there's a couple of other speakers that get up in the process that are actually, that are, that are better than him.

• 1:13:07Jocko Willink?

  So why are you so hyped on this thing that you watched it 499 times?

• 1:13:11Ben Milligan?

  You know, I think a lot of it was just because, I mean, you know, some of the things that are said, you know, they're talking about this, you know, this revolution, uh, that's, that's undergoing, uh, with naval warfare, that's about to, you know, undergo with naval warfare. Uh, and when, when Burke gets up, he articulates sort of, you know, his ideas and, you know, so many of his ideas are, you know, uh, the, the Navy's at the cusp of this technological revolution. And so when Burke comes into office, my, you know, any, any person who listened to that speech would think, all right, well, the Navy is going to evolve, uh, they're, they're going to go deeper, they're gonna go further up, they're going to, uh, you know, start taking advantage of nuclear weapons.

• 1:13:53Ben Milligan?

  It's gonna be a technological revolution, uh, in the Navy, and that's where, where it will stop. But that's not what happens. Burke's, um, uh, Burke's interest, um-

• 1:14:06Ben Milligan?

  Burke's emphasis does not stop. He, yes, he modernizes the fleet. He takes, he puts nuclear weapons on submarines. He stretches the Navy's reach from, you know, the bottom of the ocean to the edge of the atmosphere. But in between that gap, he also does a lot of things. And, you know, I think the most consequential is the establishment of this unit. You wouldn't have predicted that, or you would not have seen, you know, a, he would not have, you know, conveyed any plans like that in that, that presentation. So, or that initial speech. So I was watching it, not just for what was said, but what, for what was not said.

• 1:14:50Jocko Willink?

  How much credit are you giving to Kennedy in this whole gig?

• 1:14:53Ben Milligan?

  So Kennedy, so there's a lot of, you know, old frogmen that you meet, who, they still think that the SEAL teams would not exist without Kennedy. It's a really, apparently compelling, you know, myth. I don't know why, because, you know, Kennedy dies in November of 63. The SEAL teams are established in January of 62. And if there's anything that we learn, you know, in the preceding chapters of this book, is that, you know, all of these units, you know, they, they could have been, you know, killed in the crib, you know, they could have, you know, strangled to death in infancy, or smothered, you know, by a pillow is how I describe it. Like, these, all of these units could have been, you know, disbanded.

• 1:15:37Ben Milligan?

  I mean, the SEAL teams are only two years old at the time of Kennedy's death. So even if Kennedy had been responsible, and I don't think he is, because all of the committees that Burke has convened, before Kennedy's even elected, you know, they precede, you know, they precede his election. They're already mentioning, you know, the word SEAL before Kennedy's elected. They have these plans already in place. Kennedy's supportive of them, but he's not the, he's not the reason that they're... Put into place.

• 1:16:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, some of Kennedy's speeches, you know, he's talking about unconventional warfare. He's talking about all these commando type things.

• 1:16:14Ben Milligan?

  And he wants everybody to get involved in this. He does. But the Navy was, the Navy's already forward leaning into this. I mean, the Army too, the Army, I mean, and when Kennedy comes in, you know, his, you know, he has a love affair with the concept of, you know, counterinsurgency and the, and his favorite, you know, unit of all time, which is the Army Special Forces. But.

• 1:16:37Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, I think I, I've read a speech of his at West Point. That's real, actually, I've read it on this podcast because it's sort of how, it, it, it indicates so much, the whole idea of the Special Forces, the Special Operations, and how big it's going to be for him. What about going, as you're trying to research the Bay of Pigs, you know, you got the CIA, was there, how available is information about that?

• 1:17:00Ben Milligan?

  It's a black hole.

• 1:17:02Jocko Willink?

  To this day, huh?

• 1:17:03Ben Milligan?

  To this day, I don't know how many requests I made of the CIA's archives for information. I would find, you know, a thing here or there, but not, not very much. There, I was able to find several of the frogmen that participated in the Bay of Pigs. I was writing, up until the final days, before the publisher literally, you know, ripped the book out of my hands, I was, I was talking to Korean frogmen, or Cuban frogmen, and, you know, found one, couldn't believe I found him, interviewed him, and then he gave, you know, me a number for another guy, couldn't believe, you know, he did, and I talked to him, gave me a number for another

• 1:17:46Ben Milligan?

  one. Before I knew it, I was talking to all these guys, and I was like, oh my gosh, this is incredible. Didn't, never expected, you know, to, to find any of these, you know, covert operatives, but, you know, here they are, and they wanted to tell their story. So, it was pretty cool.

• 1:18:02Jocko Willink?

  Awesome. So we get through that time. Anything else you want to cover in that chapter?

• 1:18:08Ben Milligan?

  I mean, you could, no, I think Grayson Lynch and Rip Robertson, I mean, these are

• 1:18:15Jocko Willink?

  And these are guys that you cut?

• 1:18:17Ben Milligan?

  I didn't cut them. They're in the book. I mean, they, they, they could be their own. Yeah, they could be their own books. I mean, they're both, you know, they're, they're both the CIA, you know, not case officers. They're the paramilitary officers that are leading,

• 1:18:32Ben Milligan?

  not just the reconnaissance, not just the Cuban frogmen or the raid that the Cuban frogmen do, but they're also, you know, running the entire

• 1:18:43Ben Milligan?

  the mission. They're, they're back on ships, you know, relaying information, doing everything they can to support the invasion. They're held, you know, back. And then when the brigade forces collapse, both Robertson and Lynch, they spend two weeks sleeping almost not at all, doing everything they can to rescue as many brigade survivors as they can. So when they finally do get pulled, or when they finally do get pulled, and the Navy's supporting that entire effort. The Navy doesn't support the, the initial raid almost at all, despite Burke's repeated protests and his repeated attempts to get Kennedy to, to let

• 1:19:24Ben Milligan?

  the Navy intervene. But the Navy does not abandon the Cuban Brigade members. They, they, night after night, the Navy's sending whaleboats ashore, do anything they can to rescue survivors. And the most compelling characters in the whole testimony that are Robert Kennedy convenes in the aftermath of these two guys, when they, they show back up to testify in front of this committee, and they're, they're completely sunburnt black almost. They show up in boots that are salt, that are crusted white with saltwater. I mean, they're pretty, pretty convincing. And, and Grayson Lynch, you know, he goes to his grave, you know, hating anything,

• 1:20:08Ben Milligan?

  you know, remotely related to Kennedy. He goes on to another career. He was in Omaha Beach. He was at Omaha Beach. He became, it was a Green Beret. He joins the CIA. I think he ends his government service with the DEA. He starts the DEA, if you can believe it.

• 1:20:25Jocko Willink?

  That brings us up to chapter 10, which is titled Kennedy's Army of Gladiators and the Counterinsurgency that blunted their swords, then cleared the way for another contender.

• 1:20:41Jocko Willink?

  Echo is getting a kick out of that one. And you know, you talk about the fact that this was a really hard chapter for you to write. And you, this is, this is, and it makes sense that it's hard to write because you've got the special forces.

• 1:21:00Ben Milligan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:00Jocko Willink?

  Which by all means, look, if the Marine Corps isn't gonna make some kind of a maritime special operations, go anywhere force, then if the, if the Marine Corps is not gonna do that, then certainly the Army Special Forces should become this capability. And it's a very bizarre, bizarre is a strong word. It's a very interesting thing that drives them in a different direction.

• 1:21:29Ben Milligan?

  Right. Yeah, I mean, it's totally unpredictable. I mean, they, they create them in 1952, sort of right after the failure of the Virginia One raid. But they see the potential of partisans, or they see the potential of guerrilla forces. I mean, the one disadvantage that the West has compared to the communist forces of the Soviet Union are, we don't have as many men, we just don't have the manpower. So, or at least in the, in the military, we don't. So, our idea, or the, the idea of special forces is to be able to, you know, parachute, you know, behind enemy lines and raise a guerrilla force to raid the enemy's vulnerable spaces.

• 1:22:10Ben Milligan?

  The problem that they, you know, discover in this period between 1952 and 1962 is that the Soviet Union is not like other countries, it's not like the West. If you want to, you know, create a partisan force in central Colorado, you might be able to do it. You might be able to find some, you know, wingnuts out there and raise a militia and, you know, go attack. You know, oil plants or whatever, you could probably do that because we have an open society.

• 1:22:33Jocko Willink?

  I was gonna say, that does happen.

• 1:22:35Ben Milligan?

  Yeah, right. Yeah. But, you know, you can't do that in a, in a

• 1:22:40Jocko Willink?

  In the Soviet.

• 1:22:41Ben Milligan?

  In a Gestapo state or a Soviet Union because they know, they've got identity cards on everybody. I mean, you can't, there's just not, there's not the infrastructure to be able to do that. So the special forces, you know, have, you know, this idea that you're gonna have behind the lines raiders made up of indigenous forces, it's ridiculous. So they sense that, they know that, and they start to, you know, evolve themselves. They transform themselves into a completely sort of different unit, which Kennedy finds out about. Or it's sort of, you know, the, these two things are sort of happening at the same time. Kennedy is discovering this concept of counterinsurgency and the winning of hearts and minds

• 1:23:22Ben Milligan?

  and the, the least, if not, the creation of American freedom fighters, at least denying tribesmen and indigenous peoples to the Soviets. So why don't we support these people? Why don't we, you know, give them weapons? Why don't we train them how to fight? And it becomes, you know, the perfect, you know, marriage of capability and an opportunity. Counterinsurgency and the special forces. So they're married together and that leads us into Vietnam.

• 1:23:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, the, the transition, these guys started off, where, where they started, you know, in the early 1950s. It looks like they could end up just being a good commando force or a

• 1:24:09Ben Milligan?

  They could.

• 1:24:10Jocko Willink?

  Straight up commander force.

• 1:24:11Ben Milligan?

  Absolutely.

• 1:24:11Jocko Willink?

  I mean, I'm going to the book here, you say, established in 1952, the special forces had been intended to replicate the experiences of its founder and first commander, former OSS operative Colonel Aaron Bank in 1944. As a 41-year-old Jedberg, he had dropped into France, led resistance fighters. Then in 1945, as improper as it sounds, had almost led an operational group of German POWs into the Alps on a mission to capture Hitler. Hell, yeah. Guided by these examples, Bank and his successors had erected an organization to match their mission. Two thousand airborne qualified soldiers spread across three forward staged battalion sized groups, one in Okinawa, one in Germany, one in Fort Bragg, North Carolina,

• 1:24:56Jocko Willink?

  all ready at a moment's notice to drop into an enemy country and lead a ready band of resistance fighters. To physically create these groups, a special warfare center had been hacked out of a remote corner of Fort Bragg in the mid 1950s and volunteers had been recruited. Plenty of former Rangers, old jockstrap type commandos. No first enlistments or second lieutenants permitted to apply, and ushered through a three month course in guerrilla warfare with a staggering 90% dropout rate. This was followed by language instruction and individual courses in one of four specialties, weapons, demolition, radio communications, and longest of all, medicine. The pipeline culminated with a

• 1:25:37Jocko Willink?

  multi-week exercise in which candidates infiltrated a notional enemy country linked up with a band of dissidents, which were other candidates, sent up a hinterland base camp, imparted their individual specialties, and then led their guerrillas on a series of raids and ambushes, all while avoiding an aggressor force of local deputies, national guardsmen, and state police.

• 1:26:01Jocko Willink?

  There you go, man.

• 1:26:04Jocko Willink?

  That's special forces. I mean, that's, what is it, Robin Sage?

• 1:26:07Ben Milligan?

  That's Robin Sage, yeah. And they still have it, and they, you know, still the idea is that you're going to be able to lead or find these groups. I think that's the, that's the, that's the trick, is how do you find these groups in, you know, Soviet societies, or societies where, you know, you have a, an aggressive, you know, Gestapo type police force. You don't have a free society. Like, and the only place that you're going to find, you know, a ready pool of candidates to, you know, join a thing like this is in, you know, sort of ungoverned spaces where there aren't, you know, these, you know, state police or secret police.

• 1:26:50Jocko Willink?

  What's the deal with Yarborough's daughter?

• 1:26:53Ben Milligan?

  Oh, it's one of the, you know, things that I was, uh, so Yarborough, he's the, um, it was tough to find the character in this. I always tried to, you know, uh, when I was working on a chapter, working on a different unit, I was always trying to find, you know, one, you know, the operation that was, um, you know, most consequential to driving, you know, that mission's either success or failure, their continuation, their disbandment. But then, once I found the operation, or the program, or something, I was always trying to find the character that was most important to that mission's success or failure. Um, Yarborough, this, this chapter is distinct in one way, it's not, there's no operation.

• 1:27:38Ben Milligan?

  I'm, I'm covering lots of little mini battles. I mean, war is changing at this point, so, you know, the, the, sort of the, um, uh, the, the, the chapter structure that I had settled on in World War II and the Korean War, you know, where I focus on one main operation, it's kind of gone at this point in the book, because, you know, there's no one, there's so many battles that are occurring, or so many little small skirmishes. But, you know, I focus on Yarborough because he's the person who, um, he creates the Special Warfare Center, or the, the schoolhouse for Green Berets, um, and, and marries, uh, you know, the Green Berets to this, uh, this new, um, uh, operation of counterinsurgency. So there's no more commando operations for the special forces, no raiding or anything like that.

• 1:28:23Ben Milligan?

  It's only COIN, or counterinsurgency. So he's training guys not to just, you know, uh, lead ambushes and things like that, but he's teaching his guys to, uh, dig wells, and, you know, how, you know, animal husbandry, and how do you, how do you convince, you know, tribal people, you know, to, to join your, your group? You have to, you know, you've got to do med checks, you've got to do all the sorts of things that nobody really likes to do. Um, but in the course of him, you know, overhauling the Special Warfare Center, um, and in the course of him preparing to showcase this to Kennedy, for Kennedy's visit to Fort Bragg, uh, his daughter, who is, um, about to, uh, marry, get married,

• 1:29:03Ben Milligan?

  uh, to another Green Beret officer, uh, she's in a terrible car accident and dies. She's killed. And Yarborough is a month away from, you know, his, you know, career making presidential visit. This is going to, you know, this visit is going to either make or break the, the special forces, everything that he's worked for. And in that period, he, like I write in the book, he cinches down his grief and he gets back to work. The first thing he does, and I managed to talk to, I interviewed Yarborough's daughter's fiance. He never married after she was killed.

• 1:29:46Ben Milligan?

  But he said the first thing that he did, and he talked to the, the general several times after his fiance was killed, but the first thing that Yarborough, Yarborough did after his wife died is the same day he went through the house and he took down every picture of her.

• 1:30:00Jocko Willink?

  You mean after his daughter died?

• 1:30:01Ben Milligan?

  After his daughter died. He went through the house, Yarborough did, and he took down every picture. Got rid of every trace of her. Couldn't handle the grief. Shut, he just shut it down. And then he spent the next month doing everything he could, poured himself into, getting ready for that presentation.

• 1:30:20Jocko Willink?

  And Yarborough drove the special forces, as you just said, into not being a commando force, but being a counter insurgency force.

• 1:30:30Ben Milligan?

  Right. Which creates another gap.

• 1:30:33Jocko Willink?

  Which, which leaves the gap, the gap remains.

• 1:30:36Ben Milligan?

  The gap remains.

• 1:30:39Jocko Willink?

  Now we end up with chapter 11. The first SEALs, their search for a mission and the report that found it for them. The Bucklue Report. What's going on?

• 1:30:55Ben Milligan?

  So, in 1964, the Navy, the Navy seeing that there is, you know, trouble in Southeast Asia and wants to contribute but does not know how. The Navy is run by traditional blue water sailors, as it always is, and...

• 1:31:19Ben Milligan?

  Is trying to figure out how to contribute to this, you know, conflict and they, they gather together, uh, seven, uh, seven naval officers led by a, um, a, a blue water sailor Admiral Savage, uh, they, um, send the survey team to Vietnam to, you know, get a lay of the land and figure out how the Navy can contribute. Um, it's, uh, the group itself is, you know, comprised of, uh, a lot of the Navy's kind of unconventional thinkers. Um, uh, David Del Judas, who's the first commanding officer of SEAL Team One, uh, he's there, he's sort

• 1:31:58Ben Milligan?

  of acting as a contributor slash, uh, Admiral's aide. Um, there's a former UDT officer, a Silver Star winner, um, and there's, uh, Phil Bucklew and, uh, several others who have spent considerable time in Vietnam. So Phil Bucklew, um, at this point is he, he's a captain or an O6. Um, he's the second in command. Uh, they're there for less than a week when Admiral Savage has a, I'm not sure, the record is unclear, he has either a heart episode or he, um, he, he gets into an alcohol-related incident and is forced to retire back to, uh, the States. Regardless, it leaves Phil Bucklew in charge of the survey

• 1:32:40Ben Milligan?

  team. Now, what would have happened if Admiral Savage had, uh, remained in his position as the, uh, as the survey leader? I don't know, but what we do know is what did happen, and that's Phil Bucklew, who was the, um, the most, um, uh, forward-leaning or, um, uh, you know, he, he, the, the person who's still in the military who has, uh, experienced every unconventional, uh, uh, phase of the Navy's sort of inland adventurism. He's now in charge of this, uh, this survey team. They spend six weeks, you know, going around the entire country. They go to so, uh, special forces camps, uh, they, they travel up the

• 1:33:21Ben Milligan?

  Mekong River, uh, they examine, uh, where, uh, supplies are coming in, if they're, uh, as the Navy is contending or as the Navy argues, that they're being, uh, sailed down, um, uh, around the coast and, uh, infiltrated, um, uh, along, uh, along the, the ocean coast.

• 1:33:39Ben Milligan?

  And what they figure out is that none of that is happening. None of the Navy's claims are true. All of the contraband, all of the weapons that are being funneled to the insurgency are coming right down that Mekong River. And they're being injected throughout the country through various waterways. He discovers this and says, we are not going to have an impact if the Navy doesn't leave Blue Water and starts doing what the fleet did in the American Civil War. And that's hitting, hitting the brownwater rivers. And in the report, you know, he makes a point to say that, you know, there's lots of opportunities for raiding along these rivers. He only mentions the SEALs once, never really connects them

• 1:34:24Ben Milligan?

  to that idea of raiding. But he, he does, you know, say explicitly in the report, the Navy should be in charge of that inland raiding mission. And when the report's delivered, it's sort of, you know, and the whole process of this, like, everybody's trying to get a hold of his report before he publishes it, before he takes it back to the Navy. Paul Harkins, who's in charge of MACV at the time, his deputy, William Westmoreland, they're all trying, they're having lunch with him. Henry Cabot Lodge is the ambassador to Vietnam. Everybody's trying to get a look at Phil Buckley's report. Phil Buckley,

• 1:35:09Ben Milligan?

  to his credit, he does not want to let this thing out of his hands until he has a chance to let his Navy superior see it first. It's, you know, it's still controversial. Like, you know, the Navy, like I said, the Navy hadn't been involved in a war like that for over, for over a hundred years.

• 1:35:27Jocko Willink?

  So you're saying it's controversial because of that?

• 1:35:30Ben Milligan?

  It's controversial because he's advocating for, you know, this, this, this riverine force. This, this force that's going to take us away from the Blue Water, away from, you know, the Navy's emphasis at that point, which is aircraft and aircraft, and aircraft carriers and, and nuclear subs and everything like that. You're, you're, you're putting us back in the weeds. But having been, you know, the, a veteran of the scouts and raiders, and then a veteran of Saco, and then a, in charge of the Navy's relationship with the CIA during the Korean War, and all the various CIA raids with the UDTs in the Korean War, I mean, he is, he's

• 1:36:15Ben Milligan?

  positioned, I mean, he's, he's taking his biography, and he's saying, "Well, why shouldn't we be doing this? I've experienced two wars where we've done this already. We absolutely should be trying to support this effort as much as possible. If the, if the government or if the country has decided that this is worth American lives, then it should be, it should be a mission worth Navy lives as well."

• 1:36:38Jocko Willink?

  And he delivers that report to just-

• 1:36:41Ben Milligan?

  General Feld.

• 1:36:42Jocko Willink?

  And they-

• 1:36:43Ben Milligan?

  Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet.

• 1:36:44Jocko Willink?

  They're, they're head over heels in love with this thing.

• 1:36:47Ben Milligan?

  No, they're not head over heels. They, they, this report gets passed back and forth. I mean, it becomes, like I said in the book, it becomes a bit of a hot potato.

• 1:36:56Jocko Willink?

  Where does it get traction?

• 1:36:57Ben Milligan?

  Uh, it all, I'm not sure where it ultimately gets traction, because it takes two years for really the Navy to, you know, put this thing into effect before they field, you know, the Navy Riverine Force, or CTF 116, Combined Task Force 116.

• 1:37:12Jocko Willink?

  Was there a champion for it above Phil H. Bucklew?

• 1:37:15Ben Milligan?

  Not that I could find.

• 1:37:16Jocko Willink?

  Interesting.

• 1:37:17Ben Milligan?

  But everybody, uh, um, I, if, if I had to guess, I would guess it was probably somebody like Norville, Norville Ward, who becomes more important later. But I'm not sure. I didn't find him.

• 1:37:33Jocko Willink?

  One other part of this chapter that I wanted to run through, because it's pretty freaking awesome, is this, uh, at some point, the Navy sends down some, some, uh, like, academics and some, some psychologists. And so, so I gotta read this part.

• 1:37:55Jocko Willink?

  When the Navy's academics had arrived in 1955 to observe UDT training, their purpose had been to validate the course's individual selection tests, the soft sand runs, the ocean swims, the harassments of Hell Week, and, short of invalidating any of these, to develop what they called "realistic selection standards" that would reduce what the Navy admitted was the course's excessive attrition. Subjecting students to a battery of personality tests and classifying their individual traits, age, education, intelligence, and so on, the academics hoped not only to predict the candidate's likelihood of success in training,

• 1:38:36Jocko Willink?

  but also his success in an actual underwater demolition team. In the course of these assessments, they learned that the students below the age of 21 were 8% more likely to fail, roughly the same rate as high school dropouts. While students from broken homes were just as likely to graduate as anyone else. Based on the number of times a student had volunteered to visit the dispensary, which is medical, assessors determined that a candidate in moderate health, who minimized the psychological importance of pain, fatigue, and intense discomfort, stood a much higher chance of success than,

• 1:39:18Jocko Willink?

  quote, "the most physically fit who were over-concerned about their injuries." So you're better off just being a tough son of a bitch that maybe can't run too quick, but I don't care if my knee hurts. I'm gonna keep going. The least common traits among successful frogmen seem to be restraint, thoughtfulness, sociability, and cautiousness.

• 1:39:48Jocko Willink?

  The most common were responsibility, emotional stability, original thinking, objectivity, and most of all masculinity. So, you know, as I read through that, I mean, it just, you, you just picture every team guy that you know, and you know where the bell curve is. And, yeah.

• 1:40:11Ben Milligan?

  I mean, I, I had a, I, I knew that this had to get in the book. I bounced it around from section to section because I had about, you know, 15 years, you know, to play with. I finally, you know, found a home for it here and I was, I was really happy that I did. There's lots of these little like assessments that they had put together over the years and they were trying to like, understand.

• 1:40:31Jocko Willink?

  And they still try and understand.

• 1:40:32Ben Milligan?

  They still, they still do.

• 1:40:33Jocko Willink?

  And they still have no idea.

• 1:40:34Ben Milligan?

  No idea. That's, that's why it's so great because it's just, I mean, this is a report done in 1955. We're still at this. We still have no like.

• 1:40:43Jocko Willink?

  The Navy still says, hey, why can't you figure out who's going to make it? Why is your attrition rate so high? They still say, I mean, the attrition rate right now is insane buds. It's insane. 10, 15% are making it through. It continues on, later studies had gone on to test a, a variety of variables, including the benefits of wheat germ in a student's diet, which proved predictive, predictably negligible, and a series of Rorschach tests and psych, psychiatric interviews to determine the effect of sexuality on a candidate's success or failure. Successful frogmen, said the sex report's author, appeared to require this specific, rather masculine and adventurous occupation with all of its self-destructive and masochistic implications.

• 1:41:27Jocko Willink?

  Because, and this was just the author's speculation of their magical attraction to the depth of the sea and the security of the womb and an unconscious motivation to prove their masculinity, coupled with a fear of involvement with women.

• 1:41:45Jocko Willink?

  Oh, setting aside the psychoanalyst tendency to project their own insecurities onto their subjects, the Navy had not been able to argue with the UDT's results.

• 1:41:56Ben Milligan?

  That was not the worst dig. I got one in there.

• 1:42:00Jocko Willink?

  "I have never met a group of more self-reliant, hell-for-leather characters," wrote reporter Bill Stapleton after accompanying a UDT to St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands in 1955. "Besides their typical reconnaissance exercises, submarine lockouts, and tests with miniature submersibles, the Frogmen had also salvaged a 50-foot yacht from a reef, twisted the tails of passing sharks, and when an American sailor had disappeared into the harbor on a moonless night, had commandeered a truck, roared to the wharf's edge, and as if they'd been scouting the contours of an enemy beach, dove online until they found the drowned man. In their free time, they spearfished,

• 1:42:45Jocko Willink?

  drank untold amounts of beer, erected beachside bonfires, and in overflowing pots of seawater and vinegar boiled lobsters and astonished the superstitious natives by broiling barracuda steaks. 'You eat barracuda, barracuda eat you,' they had said. 'Promises,' replied a Frogman. 'Nothing but promises.' So exclusive were the UDT's, said one observer, that even rank meant nothing to them. When seen in their standard swim trunks and belt knives, surrounded by charts and diving equipment, and asked by passerby if they were indeed in the Navy,

• 1:43:27Jocko Willink?

  the Frogmen would invariably reply, regardless of the asker's rank, 'Nope, we're all in UDT.'"

• 1:43:39Jocko Willink?

  So there you go. I went to St. Thomas one time.

• 1:43:44Ben Milligan?

  Did you?

• 1:43:45Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, and it sounds about like this. We rented a room. So we were doing training in Puerto Rico and I think we got, we got a little, we chartered a plane and bro, this is like 1990, whatever. I mean, this is not when you people are chartering planes. I don't know who pulled this together. We chartered a plane. We go to St. Thomas. We get there. That place is beautiful, by the way, but we rent, we've got an 18 man, we were, we were an arg platoon. We've got an 18 man platoon. So I'm pretty sure everyone went, but most of us went. We got a bunch of guys. Most of the platoon. We rent one hotel room.

• 1:44:29Jocko Willink?

  For everyone to stay in because you know, we're all cheap and besides who's planning on sleeping when we're going to be, uh, long story short. When I get back to the hotel room at seven or eight o'clock in the morning on Saturday morning. All these guys are asleep. And I remember there was someone that had pulled, because there was air conditioning in the little hotel we were staying. So two guys had pulled the curtains off, like ripped the curtains off the curtain rods and were rolled up in the curtain rods like blankets on the floor. Like a bunch of just savages.

• 1:45:04Jocko Willink?

  So really not that much has changed. The young UDT, uh, spirit survives.

• 1:45:15Jocko Willink?

  And meanwhile, this report that you, that you talked about is, is circulating and now we're starting to get some, some traction and starting to figure out, um, what's going on. Chapter 12, chapter 12, which is called the damn break of conventional war in Vietnam and the following flood of raiders that failed to beat the Navy to the Mekong Delta. All but one.

• 1:45:46Jocko Willink?

  That's impressive, right, Echo? Yeah. That's good. Let me get into this one a little bit. Uh, the CIA had already discovered there were challenges in attempting to break a wild herd of Mustangs. These are Vietnamese soldiers that they're trying to train into wearing a warrior's, a war chariot's yoke. The CIA's initial solution to this Mustang breaking was, as usual, to outsource the job to the US military's trainers and advisors. In this case, however, the CIA's planners did not offer the job to their standby pool of Special Forces A teams, but instead took a long shot chance on a three-man element from SEAL Team One. A gamble due to the element's leader, a man who had convinced the CIA planners that he

• 1:46:28Jocko Willink?

  was the equivalent of an entire Special Forces A team. He almost was. With a boxer's jab that could part the Red Sea, said one who saw it, and a six-foot, three-inch frame that could have waded through it, it had been natural to assume that storekeeper first-class Robert Wagner's most likely contribution to the SEAL teams would have been in pure pugilistic combat. His instincts for it were undeniable. Driving a Jeep through a MACV compound and passing so close to an Army sergeant that the offended man had taken a swing at Wagner's lieutenant in the passenger seat, Wagner

• 1:47:09Jocko Willink?

  had responded by slamming on the brakes, then beating the sergeant so savagely that the lieutenant had feared for the man's life. "I never saw anything like that," the lieutenant said later. Not an uncommon expression whenever Wagner was around. As one of the only enlisted UDT R graduates of that period to be selected to skip the mandatory stint in UDT for a direct assignment to a SEAL team, Bob Wagner, despite a wife and four young children, had predictably risen to become one of the team's most eager volunteers for repeat deployments to the Ben-Hi and LDNN, three six-month tours in three years.

• 1:47:51Jocko Willink?

  In his role, he had earned a reputation among superiors that had swung between the superlatives of perfectionist advisor and perfect SEAL. Reputations he had cultivated while simultaneously building a name as a wheeler dealer for his part ownership of a beachside bar in Da Nang called The Blue Moon. Clean cut for a SEAL, even by 1960s standards. His face a graph of hard angles and straight lines below a flat top deliberately raked to attention. His only physical feature that suggested he was anything more than a lockstep conventional were his eyes.

• 1:48:28Jocko Willink?

  Hard, focused, a bit like a predator in pursuit of its prey, and implying a similar pace.

• 1:48:40Jocko Willink?

  Dude, you're a good freaking writer, man.

• 1:48:44Jocko Willink?

  I mean, that's just an awesome, an awesome little, uh, little section there. So we got the MACV SOG, we got Force Recon going on, we got the LURPs, we got the PRUs.

• 1:48:55Ben Milligan?

  Yeah, it's a tough one. This is a tough, this is a tough, uh, period to cover because all of this stuff is happening all simultaneously. This is the one chapter that sort of stands alone in the, uh, in all my chapters is they don't focus on one person. I focus on, you know, four, uh, distinct, uh, units, uh, probably the most important being the one you just read, Bob Wagner, who is, um,

• 1:49:22Ben Milligan?

  he is, he's a tough character to, to, um, uh, compress and to, you know, he, it's, it's,

• 1:49:33Ben Milligan?

  it's difficult, you know, to, you know, highlight SEALs that were, you know, standouts. Or, I mean, it's a, it's a, it's a standout group already. I mean, the, you know, the guys that are selected from UDT, uh, to come to the SEAL teams, they're the, they're the best guys in UDT. Um, and then to, you know, you know, figure out who the best guys in the SEAL teams were at this point is, is also difficult. But then when you, you look at somebody like Wagner, who kind of stands above everybody, you know, in his, um,

• 1:50:03Ben Milligan?

  One, his foresight, but his, his ability to, you know, you know, use everything, all the, all the tools that he has in his personality, everything from straight force. I mean, he, in the, in the course of his creation of the PRU camp, lots of different entities come in to try and steal this from him, and he uses a variety of ways to keep them out. One, he just threatens to kick their ass. Two, he, you know, like I say in the book, he threatens to, you know, pack up his bags and go home, which, you know, convinces the CIA planners to push everybody else aside. He, he, so, he's, but, you know, all while

• 1:50:47Ben Milligan?

  he's doing that, while he's building this program that nobody else is building, and he's just, I mean, he's running from place to place to place. He's participating in missions. He's conducting rifle range training himself. He's managing his own bar. He, you know, he doesn't, I mean, he, he created the one bar, the Blue Moon in Nang, but he also creates a separate bar down. He's like franchising liquor places. I mean, he's like, in some sense, he's the, you know, he's the, the 1966 version of Jaco. He's just, I mean, he's completely, but he's, and, you know, the whole time, he's got, you know, family with the five kids, you know, being at home. But he's like, he'll come home for six months, he'll deploy for six months, he'll come home for six months.

• 1:51:32Ben Milligan?

  I mean, he's just, he's relentless. And by this point, you know, in his career, he's already done six separate tours to Vietnam. Like, he's, he's incomparable. While he's doing that, while he's- Where did you get most of your information about him from? There were, there'd been a decent amount of, well, he, he did a recording to capture this entire creation. He did it with Franklin Anderson. So Franklin Anderson was his commanding officer at SEAL Team One. He finds out what Wagner has been doing and thinks that Wagner has been kind of-

• 1:52:14Ben Milligan?

  You know, exceeding the boundaries of what he was been allowed to do. So Wagner, he sits down with an interviewer that he commissions himself. And he explains the whole thing. He's not going to take his time to write down everything he did. But he's like, you want to talk to me about this? Bring an interviewer here and then you can take the transcript back to Anderson. And he does it. He, he, the whole thing is recorded. He transcribes the thing and passes it back to SEAL Team One Commander Anderson. Anderson reads the thing and becomes his greatest advocate at that point. Um, so yeah, he did break all the rules to make this happen, but he didn't.

• 1:52:49Jocko Willink?

  It's a good little leadership thing. Sometimes when you're in a leadership position and you're watching something happen from the outside and it looks a certain way and it's pretty easy to get caught up in it. You don't necessarily even have to be a leadership position, but like, you know, let's say you're watching a different unit. You know, I'm watching a Marine Corps unit, see what they're doing from afar. And I think, what the hell are these guys doing? And you, if you don't, if you're not careful, you can look at someone from a distance and start to be very judgmental without actually understanding anything of that that's going on in the ground. So that's something I always tried to be very careful of. If I was watching a unit, they were doing something that didn't seem to make sense to me. Instead of me going, Ben's over there like an idiot running these operations. I would actually reach out to him.

• 1:53:34Jocko Willink?

  You say, hey, Ben, can you explain to me what's going on? It looks like you're doing some wild stuff. Can you talk to me, talk me through why it's happening? That's a mistake that, that, that people make and you have to be careful of it. And that's a great example of, well, what do you do? If you think somebody's, well, what you should do is go talk to them. Go find out what's going on. And you know what? Maybe you do see something that maybe I do say, hey, Ben, you start telling me how you're doing it. And I say, hey, you might want to think about this. And you go, that's a good point, you know? Or maybe I say, oh, wow, I, I, I understand now what you are. You know, we had a little bit of this with, uh, doing daytime operations in Ramadi. Why the hell are SEALs doing daytime operations? And it's like, I could completely understand someone thinking that, right? What, what are you doing?

• 1:54:17Jocko Willink?

  Why are you giving up your advantage of doing operations at night when we have night vision and the enemy doesn't? Hey, that's a great point. Here's the thing. We are, our, our actual mission, tasking from the Siege of Sotif is to train and fight company and platoon sized elements of Iraqi soldiers. Guess what they don't have? Night vision. Matter of fact. They would have about one flashlight for every four guys. So taking these guys out in the middle of the night was dangerous. And did we do it? Yes, we did. We did it usually in direct action raids where we could set up a situation where white light was okay.

• 1:55:00Jocko Willink?

  Cause we had already, you know, set off a breach or whatever. And now we're just clearing buildings or they're just clearing buildings. But we, we, we, we had to get the, in order to fight these guys, in order to get them out on the battlefield, they were gonna have to do stuff in a day. That's part one. Part two is we owned the night and you know, who knew that the enemy knew that. And so guess what the enemy did at night? They didn't do anything at night. We'd go out at night, there'd be no one out there. Literally no one doing anything, but as soon as the day came out, or as soon as the, the sun came up and the call to prayer went, then it was, oh, here comes the enemy. Cause they know they, it's a more even match. And now they're out there moving amongst the civilian populace too, who's also awake and

• 1:55:38Jocko Willink?

  has to go, you know, down to the, down to the corner store to grab some, uh, dates from the, from his neighbor or whatever. They start moving around. So now the enemy can move around with the camouflage of the local populace. Now, if I was on the outside seeing what the hell is task unit bruiser out there doing daytime operations, it might not make sense. As soon as you get an explanation like that, it's like, okay, okay, I get it. There's some, there's some reason for this happening. So that's a good lesson that, uh, got learned right there. If someone's doing something that seems a little bit crazy, fi- ask them, find out, ask them why they're doing it.

• 1:56:16Ben Milligan?

  As it happens, uh, if we're gonna, I mean Franklin Anderson is still around, like he's, and he is, he's in his late nineties, but he's still sharp as a tack. I talked to him maybe a week ago.

• 1:56:30Jocko Willink?

  Cool. Let's get him on the podcast.

• 1:56:32Ben Milligan?

  He remembers everything.

• 1:56:35Jocko Willink?

  That's awesome.

• 1:56:36Ben Milligan?

  He's in Durango, Colorado, uh, and anytime I call, um, you have to, you know, start leaving a message on the machine and just start talking because eventually his wife is gonna pick up. And invariably she's gonna pick up and she's gonna like, I didn't know who this was. He's in the field, you know, clearing cows or something. He's always working. What a beast. He's incredible. He's a, he's a little guy, but he's, I mean, he's still out there and he's still, like, if I talk to him, if I ask him a question, okay, so was this guy at the team in 1960? He's like, no, that guy was an E5 in 1960. He told you he was an E6? No.

• 1:57:14Ben Milligan?

  How do you know this? That's awesome. He's a, he's a character. But I got, so to answer your other question about how I got some of this information about Bob Wagner, I spent a lot of time talking to all the folks that he had done this with, Guy Stone, I talked to his son, I talked to a lot of the, a lot of the people that were, you know, sort of, sort of surrounding him at the time. And he, not only is he, you know, does he build this PRU program in Vietnam, but he comes home and he builds, you know, sort of the counterpart to the PRU program in the hills, you know, 200 miles away from the ocean, in the chocolate mountains. He, you know, he, he manages to convince a, a local real estate magnate to give him like 1,200

• 1:57:59Ben Milligan?

  acres of mountain territory, or mountain scrub. And he overhauls the entire area, names it Camp Macon, and then he, he just, he creates a mini PRU camp to train guys how to train other people and to lead them into combat. He goes back, on his last deployment, he, he's killed, and, and the Navy recognizes his contribution. His, you know, he's a store, he dies as a storekeeper first class, which, for any of your listeners, a storekeeper first class means he's essentially a sergeant. He's an E6.

• 1:58:42Ben Milligan?

  Staff sergeant. Staff sergeant, right. He's a staff sergeant. And for his contribution, for, you know, creating the PR, you know, the Navy's contribution to the PRU program, for creating everything he did in the United States, the Navy awards him a Legion of Merit, which is a totally, like, unheard of award for a first-class petty officer, you know, to get a two, but the Navy authorizes the V for valor with it, which never happens. So, I mean, one of the most highest, you know, awards that you can get, you know, one to a, you know, a storekeeper first class SEAL.

• 1:59:17Ben Milligan?

  His family, who I was able to interview, they, his last child was born just prior to his last deployment. They were struggling to, you know, just comprehend, you know, their father's, you know, death and, you know, not having him anymore. The Navy contacts them, lets them know that he's going to be, you know, given this, you know, incredible honor. And the Navy asks how, if they would like to come out for the presentation of the ceremony. The wife asks the oldest son, the oldest of the children, he's 16 years old, if, and leaves it in his hands, would you like to go out and receive your dad's award?

• 2:00:00Ben Milligan?

  The son decides, it's too much, and says, just mail it. I get it in the mail a couple of weeks later.

• 2:00:09Jocko Willink?

  Ah dang.

• 2:00:13Ben Milligan?

  But this chapter is not just about the P R U. This chapter is all about the neglect, not the neglect, but, you know, the Marine Corps deciding that they aren't going to fight in the Mekong Delta and the Marine Force Recon deciding that they're going to support the special forces on the CIDG camps. And then the Marine Corps deciding, well, we don't really, it's too risky to have those guys out there at the CIDG camps, we're going to keep them with the divisions. Then it's about the L R Ps or the creation of reconnaissance troops to support the divisions, whether it's the, you know, Project Delta with the Green Berets or whether it's the L R Ps with the individual divisions. Both of these units are, you know, they're, they look like SEALs, they probably act like SEALs.

• 2:00:58Ben Milligan?

  They probably would have had the same sorts of missions as SEALs, you know, in different parts of the country, to go out, find the enemy, you know, kill them, capture people and bring them back. But, you know, the emphasis of all of the divisions is to get these main, these big forces into combat with the enemy. So all they send these guys out to do is find the enemy, tell us where he is and we'll send guys to you. I mean, it's, it doesn't work because, you know, it's Vietnam and there are small pockets of enemy, you know, if you don't contact them, if you don't, you know, engage them while they're there, they're gone.

• 2:01:29Jocko Willink?

  They're gone, they're gone. When you make that radio call, now you got, however long it's going to be, they're going to be gone.

• 2:01:36Ben Milligan?

  Right, they're gone. And the most important thing about this whole period is that all of these units that are created. They're created in other parts of the country. They leave the one area of the country that has the most water, has the most, you know, reason for the Navy to be there, completely open, open for another unit to come in.

• 2:02:00Jocko Willink?

  Open for one unit to come in. Let's go to chapter 13. "The derailing of the first direct action SEALs in the Rung Sat and the detachment that restored their prospects."

• 2:02:14Jocko Willink?

  Going to the book here real quick. "When the SEALs of Detachment Delta, or Det Delta as it was called, arrived in February 1966, they numbered just three officers and 15 enlisted men, not much more than a single enhanced platoon, but a platoon so important to SEAL aspirations that it was led by Lieutenant James Barnes, SEAL Team One's commanding officer. Known as a friendly and capable administrator, the ideal sort for forging partnerships and acquiring in-country assets, Barnes was a firm believer in the SEALs' traditional interpretation of direct action and upon arrival set to gathering intelligence on all the enemy's command posts, radar dishes, and bridges."

• 2:03:00Jocko Willink?

  Barnes's problem: These simply did not exist. On a map, the 400 or so square miles worth of rivers and canals of the Rung Sat special zone looked like the splitting curving bronchioles seen in the cross-section of a human lung. On the ground, this lung was a putrid tide-water swamp that, when flushed, left behind a morass of boot-sucking mud flats and twisted root peninsulas, the high ground of which could mostly be measured above the waterline with a yardstick. Called "the evil place" by the locals, or "the forest of assassins" by the Americans,

• 2:03:43Jocko Willink?

  and was, and known as it, as a past hideout for pirates, the Rung Sat was, by the time of the SEALs' arrival, reinforcing all of these reputations since it was the source of an increasing number of rocket attacks on Saigon, plus riverbank ambushes along Saigon's main shipping channel.

• 2:04:06Jocko Willink?

  So there you go. Here comes this guy, Barnes, rolling in like, hey, we know what we're gonna do. We're gonna take out their radar positions. We're gonna take out their bridges. That's what we're gonna do. Yeah. Where are they? They don't exist. It's not that kind of war.

• 2:04:19Ben Milligan?

  I mean, this, you know, the example that you just used about, you know, getting to Ramadi and, you know, expecting to contact the enemy at night and do everything. Like, the one thing that I learned about frogmen, or at least, you know, this modern, you know, interpretation of them is they're gonna adapt to find the enemy. And this is one instance where we don't. And we almost, or the SEAL teams almost, you know, got turned away at the front door. Barnes comes in, like you said, you know, he finds that there's nothing that they've trained for. And there, and his response, you know, not, not really, you know, not, not having ever done this before and not having, you know, any real, um, you know, playbook, you know,

• 2:05:03Ben Milligan?

  to, to work from, he decides, you know, we're, we're, this isn't for us.

• 2:05:10Ben Milligan?

  And, uh, the, a series of liberty incidents ensue, and the Navy is ready, you know, kick the, uh, kick the SEALs out of the country. One, you're not, you're not engaging the enemy like we expected you to, and two, you're causing problems. So, uh, what, what do you want? So they turn, you know, to the commander of all the, uh, SEALs in country, who just so happens to be the person responsible for putting them there, Phil Bucklew. And they, they present this whole problem to them. Bucklew, uh, appeals to, uh, the commander of MACV's, uh, understanding of the naval tradition of leadership.

• 2:05:53Ben Milligan?

  Change the leader, you're gonna change the rest of the organization. So Barnes is removed, uh, after Bucklew's intercession, and an entire new detachment replaces, uh, that, that Delta, that is Deck Golf. And Deck Golf, the commander of Deck Golf is, uh, um, a junior officer by the name of, of Maynard Wires, uh, comes in and completely overhauls what the SEALs are doing. Not overhauls the mission, because, you know, the mission up to that point had really just been to, um...

• 2:06:28Ben Milligan?

  You go out into, you know, the country, set ambushes where you could, you know, see if you could find the enemy, although they hadn't had any success. But just because they hadn't had success, wires doesn't say that, you know, that's an excuse. Like, like I said, you know, in the book, his, um, his message to his men at the time was, this is the only war in town. We're not going to let it go to waste.

• 2:06:51Jocko Willink?

  (laughing)

• 2:06:52Ben Milligan?

  Uh, and so he sends his guys out every night and he goes with them. I mean, they're, they're out in the muck and the misery of the, the rungsat special zone. And, uh, night after night, whether you contact the enemy or not, we're going to be going out. So, adapt yourself to that expectation.

• 2:07:10Jocko Willink?

  And, and that's the detachment that restored their prospects?

• 2:07:14Ben Milligan?

  It does. They, I mean, by the end of that deployment, I think they have something like eighty kills. Uh, most of them are from one single contact, but they, I mean, they, they, they, they, they make things easier for themselves. They, they create like a houseboat, uh, of a old World War II era landing craft. Um, they make it so they don't have to, you know, return to base so often. They improve their living conditions. Um, they essentially, uh, just start going out for a few hours at a time, um, and finding the enemy where, where possible, um, responding to, uh, reports of, uh, enemy contact and then, you know, patrolling to those areas. Um, and they get, you know, they're not, you know, this, you know, they're not what we understand to be the SEALs, uh, today, but they're, they're awfully close.

• 2:07:59Jocko Willink?

  What was Operation Jack's Day?

• 2:08:03Ben Milligan?

  Operation Jack's Day is a attempt, it was a sort of a Marine Corps Navy mission, uh, right at the beginning, uh, right when, um, uh, that, uh, that Delta gets in country. And it's a, uh, sort of a Marine Corps led mission to sort of sweep, uh, this one, uh, suspected corner of the rungsat special zone. And it's a, uh...

• 2:08:27Ben Milligan?

  I think they claim it to be this huge success when in fact it's a bit of a disaster. There's multiple heat casualties in the process. There are a couple of enemy kills. I think the only thing real that they find in the entire three-week-long mission is a Viet Cong hospital, sort of a built-up section of log pathways and little huts. And other than that, they don't find much. SEAL teams try to contribute to it, UDTs contribute to it. The UDTs bring... I cut a bit of a section of the book on Operation

• 2:09:06Ben Milligan?

  Jack's Day. It was mostly a litany of failures by both the SEALs and the UDTs. They had bad gear. They had... Their contribution wasn't significant, so.

• 2:09:21Jocko Willink?

  And you mentioned Guy Stone when you were talking about Wagner. What was his...

• 2:09:26Ben Milligan?

  Guy Stone, he is...

• 2:09:27Jocko Willink?

  He didn't get much in the book.

• 2:09:29Ben Milligan?

  He gets a brief nod, and that's... He helps. Wagner's best friend. Wagner's best friend in the world. He helps set up the PRU training camp. But he's also important because he was a Korean War soldier. He was a forward observer in the US Army. So when the leadership at SEAL Team One is trying to adapt their naval commando force to be... to have more hard army skills, who do they turn to? Outside of their traditional avenues for support, the Ranger School and things like that, they turn to a former soldier, Guy Stone. Guy Stone sets up a curriculum. He gets smart on all of his old Army manuals,

• 2:10:13Ben Milligan?

  and he sets up training for SEAL Team One and starts putting all the guys through it. Before they go to Vietnam, they gotta go through Guy Stone's course.

• 2:10:33Jocko Willink?

  So they managed to, and again, I mean, there's so that you have so many good stories in there about what what happened, what this looked like, who these characters were.

• 2:10:46Jocko Willink?

  Now we move into chapter 14. The direct action SEALs who dodged diversion then perfected a mission that propelled the teams past the riverbanks into history. Going to the book here.

• 2:11:03Jocko Willink?

  In the winter of 1956, Robert T. Gallagher joined UDTR, and I said that already today one time, but this is what BUDS used to be called was UDTR, which is UD, Universal Underwater Demolition Teams Replacement Training. So Gallagher joined UDTR Class 17 at Little Creek, a class comprised of 97 personnel, including five Navy officers, five US Army soldier graduates from Ranger School, and one black sailor from Ohio who remarkably had taught himself to swim in a creek after a town order to integrate the local pool had prompted the owner to fill it with rocks. How'd you dig up that piece of information?

• 2:11:47Ben Milligan?

  I mean, that was from Bill Goines. He was, you know, the first, first black SEAL. He'd been one of the plank owners at SEAL Team Two, and he's, you know, just, I mean, he's, he's still, still alive and still contributing. He's helping with the Navy's recruitment efforts of, of black sailors. I mean, he's of, you know, minorities. He's, he's an incredible person, and there's not a trace of, you know, bitterness. I mean, he's just, I mean, he has every, every right to be bitter, you know, for, you know, everything that he went through, and he's just, talking to him is just, it's just such a, you know, it's a pleasure to talk to him.

• 2:12:24Jocko Willink?

  Let's get him on the podcast. At one point in the first few weeks of the temperature had dropped so low that Gallagher and his classmates had been forced to break the ice that had crusted the edge of the Chesapeake Bay so their instructors could torture them in it. A ritual not unheard of in UDT's east coast winter classes. After four weeks of this, four weeks of heaving logs over windswept sand dunes, four weeks of wet fatigues freezing to their skin, four weeks of elephant marches with boats on their head, a misery that had rubbed Gallagher's thinning, already thinning, thinning widow's peak raw, more than 50% of the class had quit, including one of the Navy officers and

• 2:13:07Jocko Willink?

  all five of the Ranger School graduates. It was just too psychological for them, one man remembered. And there had been so much farther to go. After a total of 16 weeks, Class 17 had shrunk to a mere shadow of itself. Of the 97 who had started, only 14 graduated. One of those, incidentally, was the undaunted Black Sailor from Ohio, another, of course, was Gallagher. Gallagher's subsequent career in the UDT's was more than commendable. Wherever he went, he excelled and more. This reputation, plus his standing as a sturdy drinker, had made him a natural choice for

• 2:13:51Jocko Willink?

  the first batch of frogmen to join SEAL Team Two. There, he had excelled again, undertaking the most difficult assignments, including a course to qualify as an Explosive Ordnance Disposal Technician, or EOD-Tech, one of the military's more cerebral ratings, and an eight-month overseas advisory billet to Istanbul, where he helped train the first all-Turkish Navy UDT class. From these assignments, it was possible for Gallagher's peers to assemble a portrait of his personality, hard-charging and intense, yet entirely devoid of pretense. When deployed, it was only on the rare occasion he was seen in anything but a grumpled pair of UDT shorts.

• 2:14:35Jocko Willink?

  He was above all known for his quiet confidence, the oxygen of his leadership, but with the emphasis on quiet.

• 2:14:44Jocko Willink?

  "He had all the sensitivity of a rock," remembered one teammate. "Unless at a bar, the only place he seemed to allow his sense of humor to walk around off-leash, he was just more pulled into himself than others," remembered a teammate. "Just tough to get to know." For the first of it, for the force of his personality, for his combat experience, Gallagher was, from the moment he joined, the Seventh Platoon's unofficial leader. No one argued with him. Said Roy Matthews about to depart on his first deployment, "You might win the fight, but you'd never want to go to sleep again." The reality was actually less, slightly less severe.

• 2:15:25Jocko Willink?

  Certainly Gallagher was all the aforementioned, was remote, intense, almost humorless, but there was another quality that would soon help him become one of the best combat leaders in the history of the Navy. Essentially, an orphan, from the day Gallagher had joined the SEALs, they had been, whether they knew it or not, his family. Nothing matters, nothing mattered as much to him, nothing except maybe, the mission. A mission whose evolution would have no greater contributor than Gallagher.

• 2:16:03Ben Milligan?

  I don't, I don't even know where to start with Gallagher. I, I always, I say that I don't like the term hero, but if I have to, if you had to pick one, or if you had to pick a person that, you know, to kind of, you know, set up as a, as an example for young frogmen, this is it. He's the anti-Marcinko. You know, the, he's the, he's not boastful, he's not, uh, um, he never, never stretched the truth on anything that he ever did. Um, uh, partly because he just never talked about what he did.

• 2:16:43Ben Milligan?

  I mean, he, I managed to talk to, you know, I mean, I interviewed a lot of people for the book, um, and I'd always find a way to, you know, convince somebody to, to talk to me.

• 2:16:56Ben Milligan?

  When I finally was able to track Gallagher down,

• 2:17:02Ben Milligan?

  you know, I kind of took deep breath, dialed the number.

• 2:17:08Ben Milligan?

  He answered the phone.

• 2:17:11Ben Milligan?

  I hastily ran through, "Hi, this is Ben Milligan. I'm writing a history. I'm a former SEAL." Trying to get through like, you know, my introduction. Tell him, you know, I'm going to be writing about the Seventh Platoon. Would love to hear your perspective. I've talked to many of your teammates. I've talked to Pete Peterson. I've talked to Roy Matthews. I've talked to, you know, all these guys. Would love to get your perspective if you have time. I hear, takes a pause and he goes, "I don't think I want to do that." And he hangs up.

• 2:17:42Ben Milligan?

  All the work that I had done.

• 2:17:43Jocko Willink?

  That was that, huh?

• 2:17:44Ben Milligan?

  That was it.

• 2:17:45Jocko Willink?

  That was your interview?

• 2:17:46Ben Milligan?

  That was it.

• 2:17:46Jocko Willink?

  Did you ever get anything else out of him?

• 2:17:48Ben Milligan?

  Nope. Never did. Talked to everybody. I mean, everyone in his orbit.

• 2:17:53Ben Milligan?

  Learned, I mean, learned as much about him as I've learned about anybody. He had, when you were reading through that, you know, there was stuff that didn't make the book. Like, when I say he's essentially an orphan, I mean, he's essentially an orphan. And I hope that, you know, a reader or a listener, you know, has, you know, some sense of what that means. Like, his childhood was nothing less than heartbreaking. His father abandoned him and his sister, him and his brother and his sister to a, and their mother, who had tuberculosis, essentially to a sanatorium. When the mother died, both Bob and his sister were placed in two separate orphanages.

• 2:18:36Ben Milligan?

  Bob, at the time, I believe, was only around four years old. His sister was two and a half. And they were so close, inseparable, that every night Bob would escape his dormitory in the orphanage, sneak across this really, really wide expanse of field between the girls dormitory, sneak into the girls dorm, and sneak into her bed just so she wouldn't have to sleep alone.

• 2:18:58Jocko Willink?

  And this was when he was four years old?

• 2:19:00Ben Milligan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:00Jocko Willink?

  How'd you get this information?

• 2:19:02Ben Milligan?

  From his niece, who was essentially raised like, I mean, not, I don't know if he, she was very close to her uncle.

• 2:19:13Ben Milligan?

  He uh, but he had, he, I mean, it wasn't just the war that, you know, made him, or just combat that, that made him, uh, you know, insular and, um, you know, shut off from everybody. He was, he, I think, you know, the fates kind of contributed, you know, to, to create that person. And he was not a broken person, but he had a real hard time relating to, to folks. His, you know, he's had a, you know, a bad relationship with his own children. Um, uh, his, uh, was estranged from his wife. His wife never divorced him, um, but he was estranged from her. Um, and he, you know, he had a, just a really, you know, tough time.

• 2:19:54Ben Milligan?

  I think the only person that he was really close to in life, aside from, you know, his teammates, uh, aside from, you know, somebody like Pete Peterson, um, was his sister.

• 2:20:08Ben Milligan?

  As a side note, uh, this last muster, uh, down at Fort Pierce, they had, you know, because of COVID, have you ever been to Fort Pierce and they do the muster?

• 2:20:18Jocko Willink?

  I haven't been to the muster, but, but I know about the ashes swim, but tell, tell everyone. That's awesome.

• 2:20:23Ben Milligan?

  So they, they were doing a, an ashes swim. They, uh, every year at Fort Pierce, um, once a year they will do, uh, an ashes swim. So, uh, if anyone, uh, connected to NSW has died in the previous year and they would like their ashes to be, uh, committed to the, the ocean, uh, they will, they, they do a sunrise, uh, swim, uh, out into the, uh, Atlantic, uh, and two of your teammates will escort your ashes out into the sea and they'll release, uh, release their ashes. I'd never been to one of these things. I'd heard about them. Uh, this year I was, uh, invited down to, uh, to give a talk on the history of the teams. And, uh, they, and asked me if I would, you know, participate the next morning in one of these, you know, swims.

• 2:21:09Ben Milligan?

  Uh, I knew Pete Peterson was going to be there. I'd met, you know, I'd, I'd interviewed Pete a number of times for the book and, um, uh, I knew that he was going to be swimming Bob's ashes. Bob died, uh, several months before, um, and he was going to be swimming Bob's ashes. Uh, in addition to Bob's ashes, there were two other members of the seventh platoon, uh, that were, whose ashes were going to be swum out.

• 2:21:36Ben Milligan?

  So I, you know, I told Pete, if you need, you know, a swim buddy for this, I'm happy to, happy to join you. And he was more than happy to accept. So the next morning, we're out there, you know, 4 a.m. They want us to all muster, um, you know, kind of back by the museum away from the ocean. Um, and it's November and it's pretty cold, it's in probably the high 40s. Um, and, you know, we're just out there in swim trunks with, you know, flippers and, you know, they're going down the roster. Okay. All right. Here's the, here's the name, you know, uh, here are Bob, Bob Gallagher, who's swimming Bob, you know, Pete, you know, he's in his mid 80s at this point. He raises his hand. He's, you know, got, uh, um, he's an old, he's an older guy. Um, but he's a, I'm, I'm swimming Bob. It's like, all right, who's

• 2:22:20Ben Milligan?

  swimming with Pete? I shot my hand up so fast. I'm swimming with Pete.

• 2:22:26Ben Milligan?

  But after, you know, you get your assignments, you know, right, you know, before sunrise, they march you out. And I was not expecting, you know, sort of the spectacle of what was out there. They had a shadow box set up for, uh, every person whose ashes were being swum out. So about 40 different, uh, shadow boxes with a, you know, flag. And then, uh, behind that, you know, facing the ocean, probably about 50, 50 people, uh, per shadow box, uh, of family members that were all assembled there to watch, uh, their loved ones' ashes being swum out to, uh, swum out to sea. They had a, you know, bagpipes, they had a Navy band, they had a flag team. Um, it was, it was a huge, huge collection, thousands of

• 2:23:09Ben Milligan?

  people on the beach. Uh, they do a flag ceremony. Um, so they kind of, they, they positioned the swimmers, you know, uh, behind the shadow box facing the family. Uh, and they, they go down one by one and they'll do a, you know, presentation of the flag to the family. Now they had, you know, set us up, me and, you know, me and Pete behind Bob's ashes, but right next to Bob's family.

• 2:23:35Ben Milligan?

  They had Roy Matthews, who was also in the Seventh Platoon. And they also had Ron Yaw. Ron Yaw's family was right there, too. And they were both members of the Seventh Platoon. And I'm standing there with Pete, who was, you know, their OIC, you know, in Vietnam. And you can see Pete's getting, Pete's getting emotional here. And I don't blame him. I would have been, too. And I'm starting to think, you know, seeing Pete, and they finally, you know, after the flag presentation, they hand you the ashes and they hand, you know, hand Bob's ashes, you know, to us. Bob's at least 20 pounds. I mean, the, the bag of ashes, it's pretty heavy. I'm looking at, you know, Pete, and they finally tell us, you know, about face, start

• 2:24:18Ben Milligan?

  marching to the ocean. We start backing up. Guys are getting online, you know, putting fins on. Pete's having, you know, a little bit of a tough time getting those, those fins on. I'm starting to see the, the line, you know, kind of edge away from us a little bit. Like, we're starting to be like, all right, we're, me and Pete are starting to get left behind here a little bit. Like, I'm starting to wonder if, you know, the, the waves are pretty big for Florida. I've never seen waves that big in Florida, but we're starting to back into it. And I'm looking at Pete, and I'm like, Pete, we don't have to do this, man. We can find somebody else to, to swim, you know, Bob out. We'll, we'll take care of this. If you can't, can't do this. Pete looks at me, and he goes, I, I think there's really only one thing to do here. And I was like, all right. And I start to grab his arm, like, we're gonna head back in. He takes off.

• 2:25:03Ben Milligan?

  Like, he dies for it that way. He went from being like an 83-year-old man to a 25-year-old frogman like that. I couldn't keep up with him. I'm doing everything I can to swim. I'm dragging Bob through this, sir. And finally, we get out there through the breakers. Sun comes up. Command comes out. I hand, I hand Bob to Pete. Pete lets him go. I mean, the whole, whole thing. The whole 10 years of work on this book, it was, it was worth it in that moment.

• 2:25:42Jocko Willink?

  Hmm.

• 2:25:47Jocko Willink?

  Man.

• 2:25:56Ben Milligan?

  But, I mean, you can see it, like, you see it there, like, you see, like, I mean, even the guys, I've been talking to guys that are, you know, from that era, guys that aren't even mentioned in the book, but they are, you know, to a man, they are, you know, they all express, you know, how pleased they are that, you know, Bob's contribution, you know, Bob Gallagher, who's, you know, never, you know, never, you know, touted his own achievements, I mean, if anybody's going to, you know, capture the, you know, the attention of that era, I mean, that should be him.

• 2:26:41Ben Milligan?

  There's an interesting thing about him, too, that, I mean, he, like, I say he's the anti-Marsenko, he's, he's, he's not, you know, he's not a, he, he had such pride in the rest of the Navy, like, in, in a way that, you know, I, when I set out to write this book, I always assumed that I'd be writing a book that, you know, confirmed all the myths about us, that we did all this ourselves, you know, and then the Navy, you know, was always the, you know, the, the branch of, or the, the parent command that was trying to keep us, you know, assigned to the water, and I found the opposite to be true, and then when I discovered Bob Gallagher, Bob Gallagher's lasting legacy, if anything, is, you know, how much pride he had, not just in the SEAL teams, but in his parent's service, too. He left the SEAL teams, one of the last

• 2:27:21Ben Milligan?

  things he did, he took a, a commission, which, no, I don't know that anybody, I, knows about it, but he, he took a commission as a, as a warrant officer, and one of the first things he did was he, or he had to leave the SEAL teams, he had to go to an aircraft carrier and, and, and work on this aircraft carrier with fleet sailors, and every, every SEAL that he ever met afterwards, he, to a man, he told them, it was one of the things he was most proud of, he was able to see, you know, the US Navy at work, and see how committed, you know, the, his fellow shipmates and sailors were, you know, they weren't SEALs, maybe these guys couldn't, you know, couldn't, couldn't run and couldn't do the things that

• 2:28:03Ben Milligan?

  frogmen can do, but they still had pride in their work, and they still, you know, had a mission to do, and, and he was, you know, every bit as proud of that as he was of his, you know, career in the teams.

• 2:28:13Jocko Willink?

  When, when did you, what stood out, how did you get to that, that platoon?

• 2:28:22Ben Milligan?

  You know, I spent, you know, a long time, a long time trying to figure out where that transition had occurred, you know, that transition from where the SEAL platoons were, you know, patrol and ambushers to, you know, capture-kill commandos. And, you know, Martsenko, he makes all these claims in his Rogue Warrior book, that it was his platoon, that it was the Eighth Platoon that made that transition. And I went through and I was gathering as many, you know, barn dance cards or after-action reports as I could. And, you know, I was going through operation by operation, platoon by platoon, trying to see like, you know, who had made that transition. I went through Eighth Platoon, you know, among others, I was, you

• 2:29:06Ben Milligan?

  know, I was plotting insertion points, extraction points, actions on objective points for every one of their missions. And, you know, after, you know, doing three months' worth of Martsenko's missions, I realized, every claim that he had made in Rogue Warrior was bullshit. Like, which is sad, because, you know, what his platoon did was totally commendable. It was incredible, like, what his platoon did. And their contribution to Chao Dak during the Tet Offensive, amazing. But, you know, he was making, you know, outlandish claims and, you know, and not only burnishing his legacy, but doing it at the expense of other folks, too. I couldn't understand why he was. But, I mean, I found the Seventh Platoon because I was just methodically going through these platoons, you know, platoon at a time, operation

• 2:29:49Ben Milligan?

  by, at a time. And I noticed in the Seventh Platoon's, you know, this, they started out like everybody else. You know, they got to, you know, Vietnam and they would get a little bit of intel and they would go out, they'd set an ambush, they'd, they'd patrol to contact. But by the three-month mark in their deployment, their, their, their, their operations take a noticeable turn. And this is when they meet their interpreter, Min, who's a former, or who's a Vietnamese sailor, and they enlist him into the organization. He's not just an interpreter, though. He's like, he's a source of intel. Like, he's, he's able to connect them to, you know, institutions in the country that, you know, provide them a wealth of information. And then they start going out and they, they're not just going out for Viet Cong, they're going

• 2:30:32Ben Milligan?

  out for Viet Cong with names. They know who they're going after. So you know that the Seventh Platoon makes that.

• 2:30:39Ben Milligan?

  Makes that turn and by the end of that platoon, by the, by the, by the summer of 1968, the platoon that followed the, the, the seventh platoon, they're, you know, they're, they're doing what the seventh platoon did, but, but better.

• 2:30:54Jocko Willink?

  Better, yeah.

• 2:30:55Ben Milligan?

  I mean Rudy Bosch, you know, rolls in with the 10th platoon and every platoon then it, it franchises at that point, every platoon, whether it's a SEAL, an east coast platoon or a west coast platoon, they're all doing it. They're all, you know, relying on this capture kill mission and it doesn't really start to trickle off until, you know, the, the war really starts to drive the, the end of the, the funnel, the, the money starts to shut off. You know, they stop getting, you know, rounds for their M16s. They, they, they don't get any more gas money for their Jeeps. They take Jeeps away from them. They make them start doing watch standing on, on various bases that they're on. So all the intel collection that they've been doing up to that point in the war, it's

• 2:31:40Ben Milligan?

  starting to get, you know, they're not able to do it like they were in like, you know, 69, 70, 71.

• 2:31:46Jocko Willink?

  Well, first of all, you want to, you want to get some SEALs mad, make them stand watch.

• 2:31:53Ben Milligan?

  Oh, yeah. I read that.

• 2:31:55Jocko Willink?

  These guys get so mad. We had, we had a, to stand watch, we had to stand watch on people we captured actually when my first deployment to Iraq and you would have thought, like I didn't say, hey guys, get jocked up, we got a QRF to do wherever, get your gear on, we're going into freaking hell. Guys would be like, cool, but you say, hey, I know we just did that mission, you got to stand watch at five o'clock in the morning. You kidding me? And he's so pissed off. Uh, I would take that, I would take the, the two o'clock in the morning to four o'clock. Myself and the, and the A O I C would take the worst watch of the night, the one that you had to wake up in the middle of the night, you know? The other ones you could kind of sleep until.

• 2:32:37Jocko Willink?

  Uh, no, not us, but guys don't like stand and watch. The other thing that's interesting about this is, you know, having talked to, having, having talked to a number of SOG guys. Man, they were so compartmentalized. They would get like no turnover. Things would happen. They would never tell anybody.

• 2:32:57Ben Milligan?

  Right.

• 2:32:57Jocko Willink?

  And I mean, I'm talking like lesson learned from an operation. Hey, don't use this type of weapon in this situation. They'd never hear that. It was, well, not never, but it was very limited to, to how much they would be able to pass on or that they would receive. It would all be kind of centralized. Like maybe there'd be one guy that would debrief them. Uh, so the fact that the, the SEALs were sharing, hey, this is a better way to do operations. Here's where we can make a huge impact. That's important from a leadership perspective. When you're out there working in a company, in a business, in a team. When you learn something, pass it on so everyone can benefit.

• 2:33:34Ben Milligan?

  The other thing that was like, I mean, totally benefited the SEALs at this point is, you know, this, uh, policy that the rest of the military had of individual rotation. They thought that having, you know, uh, you know,

• 2:33:46Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:33:46Ben Milligan?

  Constant, you know, presence there, you know, was, was easier to, you know, keep all the equipment there, but we'll just, you know, feed guys onesie twosies into, into a unit.

• 2:33:55Jocko Willink?

  It's horrible.

• 2:33:55Ben Milligan?

  It's terrible.

• 2:33:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:56Ben Milligan?

  You know, they get to country, nobody knows them, nobody trusts them. They don't know anybody else. Nobody wants to train them.

• 2:34:01Jocko Willink?

  Never, never worked together.

• 2:34:03Ben Milligan?

  They've never worked together. The Green Berets did that, the LERPs did that. I mean, all of these special units that we call special, you know, they are learning together as they operate.

• 2:34:12Jocko Willink?

  All the time.

• 2:34:13Ben Milligan?

  All the time. And then the best guys are getting pulled out. Whereas the SEAL teams, they were always deploying as a group. They were coming home as a group. They were training together and they would redeploy as a group.

• 2:34:24Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And by the way, you get turnover operations. Not like there's everyone shows up and now no one knows what to do. You get turnover operations.

• 2:34:30Ben Milligan?

  There was a period, two week period.

• 2:34:31Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So it's not like you're, wait, doesn't it kind of make sense to have new guys cycle in? And that way you still got some experience, guys? No, doesn't. Got to work together.

• 2:34:39Ben Milligan?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:42Jocko Willink?

  Moving on to chapter 15. And I think this might be Echo's favorite title right here.

• 2:34:51Jocko Willink?

  The Navy's skeleton key to inland combat and the final against the current achievements in the war's ebb tide that exposed the SEALs' preeminence as the US military's go-anywhere commandos. I even got you laughing at this, Ben. Your editor.

• 2:35:12Ben Milligan?

  Well, I, in my editor's defense, I'm the one that wrote the titles.

• 2:35:18Jocko Willink?

  But, as you said, it kind of explains us, you know, what's going on here a little bit. Let me go to the book. Within two months of his arrival, Zumwalt, that's the Admiral Zumwalt, strategy, Zumwalt's strategy had pulled swift boats from the coastal blockade to take over the PBR patrols in the lower delta and had reclaimed some 90% of the vessels assigned to the Mobile Riverine Force to push into bloody alley of the Parrot's Beak, that portion of Cambodia that stabbed the insurgency supply lines like a knife into the delta's heart.

• 2:35:58Jocko Willink?

  With Zumwalt's arrival, the SEALs went from being the fleet's prodigal stepchild, raiders, to the fleet's skeleton key to inland opportunities, opportunities for Navy boats, Navy ships, Navy fighters, Navy helicopters, Navy gunships, Navy intelligence officers, even Navy Seabees. To goose the Navy's involvement in SEAL operations, Zumwalt, always wearing forest green fatigues and occasionally accompanied by a camera and crew and reporters, routinely dropped in on his platoons and always posed a variant of the same question, "How can I help?"

• 2:36:41Jocko Willink?

  In short order, that help was showing up in piastres for hoy chans and interpreters, Navy jeeps to meet with sources, daily grocery drops by the Navy's helicopter transports. After the friendly fire death of Lieutenant Junior Grade David Nichols, Zumwalt took less than three days to invest in, invest one SEAL compound with an actual Navy physician. All told, it was the kind of self-serving that helped infuse the SEALs with an even greater operational capacity, so much so that within six months of Zumwalt's arrival, the headquarters of the SEALs Task Group Commander in Vietnam was finally upgraded from

• 2:37:22Jocko Willink?

  a cluttered desk at CTF 116 to an entire Kwanzen hut. "I need fifteen more, twenty more, one hundred more SEALs," remembered three-war veteran Frogman Frank Kane of Zumwalt's repeated calls to increase his compliment. When such requests collided with the reality of SEALs' actual manning numbers, no, levels nowhere close to the Green Berets, Zumwalt even enlisted the efforts and advice of the Commander of US Naval Forces in the Philippines, none other than the Bullfrog himself, Admiral Draper Kaufman.

• 2:38:01Jocko Willink?

  So, that's a huge turning point when you start getting this massive support from Zumwalt.

• 2:38:08Ben Milligan?

  Yeah, I mean, the SEALs are no longer, like, they're, they're no longer at the fringe of the Navy's operations, they're the, um, they're the, they're the harpoon, uh, that, you know, not only is, you know, striking, you know, into the heart of the enemy, but just like a harpoon, it's attached to a rope, it's pulling the rest of the Navy inland.

• 2:38:31Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, that, that little detail that you got in there of Zumwalt always wearing camis, or always wearing fatigues, that's just like...

• 2:38:39Ben Milligan?

  Yeah, I mean, it's a, you're always on the lookout for whatever, you know, that little detail that's gonna, you know, that's gonna say something else to your reader, or, you know, you, I mean, just, just the fact that, you know, he- His sideburns alone like convey to the rest of his sailors that, hey, I'm cool. I'm cool like you. You know, like, I mean, up to that point in, you know, in the Navy.

• 2:39:06Ben Milligan?

  There's no beards allowed. I mean, when, when he becomes CNO, you know, what's back in, you know, back in fashion in the US Navy? Beards. He brings it all back. But I mean, he's, he's totally, you know, he, he's a, he's a, I mean, he has the bona fides to do it. He's, um, he's a junior officer all through the, uh, through World War II. He's one of the only sailors, uh, to, to take a ship up, uh, the Wempo River into Shanghai. He actually sees what Sokko is doing at the tail end of World War II. He turns over or he, uh, does a prisoner exchange with, with Phil Bucklew, uh, in 1945. And he's seen, even if he's not participated in it, he's gotten a glimpse of what the Navy's capable of.

• 2:39:48Ben Milligan?

  And when he gets there to Vietnam, he knows the Navy could be doing more.

• 2:39:54Ben Milligan?

  And then, you know, not, not only is his role as the commander of naval forces in Vietnam important, but he's the one that ultimately becomes the chief of naval operations. He's, we thought the SEALs were, you know, important before. I mean, when he becomes a CNO, I mean, you're vaulting the SEALs a preeminence, uh, with, along with him.

• 2:40:17Jocko Willink?

  Pretty neat, the Zumwalt class ships, USS Mikey Monsour.

• 2:40:21Ben Milligan?

  Oh, it's incredible. Just, I mean, that, that connection is, yeah, that's, it's so cool.

• 2:40:29Jocko Willink?

  How about, as this is, you know, you got, but whoa, trying to put together like Bob Carey's mission? How, how hard was that?

• 2:40:39Ben Milligan?

  It's not, uh, Bob Carey's mission is, it's sort of, um, it's sort of a one-off. Like, and I thought, you know, I thought about focusing on Bob Carey's mission for the chapter, but it's, it's, it's not a, it's not like an indicator of like the Navy's inland adventurism because it's right on the coast. It's right in Na Trang Bay. What signifies that it's important in, you know, like the SEALs sort of like elbowing out its competitors is the fact that it's right around the corner from where the Green Berets are operating. Like, that's their, that's their corner of the war. So, yeah, it's coastal, but it should have been in the Green Berets' territory. And here comes, you know, SEAL Team One,

• 2:41:24Ben Milligan?

  along with CTF 115. CTF 115 is the Coastal Squadron, or the Coastal Task Force. They get their first SEALs, and what do they do with them? They start sending them everywhere. And it is, it's one of the, I mean, you look at that, that mission, and it is, it's so different from what the, the rest of the SEAL teams are doing in the Mekong Delta. But it's so indicative of, you know, this, this transformation that the SEALs have gone through. They're not a, you know, patrol and ambush force anymore. Now they're going after individual Viet Congs so they can capture them, flip them, or ransack them for, you know, other locations. So, the whole mission is not a, this is an entrepreneurial,

• 2:42:08Ben Milligan?

  this is not a, you know, let's see, let's see what we get. They know who they're going for. They've got good information and they, you know, they plan a really cool, special operation to go get them.

• 2:42:21Jocko Willink?

  Did you feel tempted to get sucked into the Sea Wolves at all?

• 2:42:27Ben Milligan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:42:28Jocko Willink?

  Because I've had the Sea Wolves.

• 2:42:30Ben Milligan?

  I had to, I had to keep them at arm's length. I was like, I don't have time. I was like, I would find, I found some, I had, I had a lot of documents about the Sea Wolves, too. I was like, man. And there, I mean Navy, uh, just the Navy, um, you know, gunship squadrons alone. I mean, they've gone through, you know, very, very similar, you know, um, uh, you know, experience of let's bring them back. Let's disband them again. Bring them back to span them again.

• 2:42:57Jocko Willink?

  Well, you, you and I experienced that. I mean, we had the, the reserve squadrons that were working pretty much as the Sea Wolves. They were like at the beck and call of the SEALs. You know, my first deployment to Iraq, it was, we work with those guys all the time. They were our full support and they were fantastic, fantastic. Uh, but the Sea Wolves in Nam, man, commissioned in Vietnam and decommissioned. The only squadron ever to be commissioned in combat and decommissioned in combat. There's that one story. They, they, they're running out of fuel. There's a platoon on the ground. They're like, we're not leaving. One bird's like, hey, we're not leaving. We'll just run out of gas. So they, they have enough gas to get in there and grab the last few guys, but they don't have enough

• 2:43:42Jocko Willink?

  gas to make it back to base. They land in the middle of a rice, rice paddy somewhere and they're using an ammo can to siphon fuel into an ammo can and pour it into the to get that thing back to base, bro. These guys, when you talk to, and the Vietnam guys that the Vietnam SEALs have had on the podcast, like you, they, they just love, absolutely without question, love the Sea Wolf guys. Cause those Sea Wolf guys, they took so much risk to support the SEALs on the ground.

• 2:44:10Ben Milligan?

  Uh, you know, when I was, uh, I, there were a couple of episodes when I was, um, I would come, I would, I would see like a report of an army slick who, you know, had said, well, we're not going to land or something like that. And then the report of a Sea Wolf pilot saying, well, if you don't land, I'm going to shoot you down. And I was, I was a little skeptical of that. I was like, I don't know if that's, that's, uh, that's cricket. And then I found another one. I was like, I'm wondering if this happened maybe a couple

• 2:44:35Ben Milligan?

  made it made it into the buck. I mean, not to, you know, ever diminish what those army slick pilots did. They were, I mean, they were doing the Lord's work too, but.

• 2:44:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And then, and then as you're trying to get like the last three years of the war.

• 2:44:48Ben Milligan?

  Yeah. To compress that.

• 2:44:49Jocko Willink?

  How hard was that?

• 2:44:50Ben Milligan?

  It was tough. I, I had to. You know, I realized that I'd made my point. I knew that I'd accomplished what I set forth to establish, which is the moment when the SEALs became what we are today.

• 2:45:05Ben Milligan?

  So now, all I was trying to do is just kind of, one, further solidify how that had happened. And I discovered some stuff along the way, like the Ninth Division being... One of the most interesting things to show how the Navy had become so important in the Mekong Delta is finally, the Ninth Division starts copying the SEALs. The LERPs start to de-conflict areas and take them away from the SEALs. And the SEALs, they want to go out and do this raid, and they can't because the Army is already there.

• 2:45:46Ben Milligan?

  And the very good chance that if the war had continued on for a little bit longer, that the Army would have taken all the Navy's missions, and the SEALs would have had to either move someplace else, adapt again. I'm not sure what would have happened, but there's a good chance that the Army's special operations would have gotten a lot better, a lot better, a lot faster. But they pulled the Ninth Division out of the country altogether, leaving the SEAL teams as the only all-American commando force in the entire Fourth Corps for two years.

• 2:46:19Ben Milligan?

  Which, I mean, talk about opportunity.

• 2:46:23Jocko Willink?

  Going back to the Sea Wolves and them being, answering the call, that's something that I learned out of the gate when I got to SEAL teams was that, hey, in NOM, if it was a platoon in trouble, or if it was a down pilot, we were going bright light, no questions asked.

• 2:46:48Jocko Willink?

  That's a, that's, that's, that's an attitude that stuck through, you know, till this day. Something's going on like that, we're going.

• 2:46:57Ben Milligan?

  I, I, I mean, and whatever, I don't know if it was pulled from, you know, the Sea Wolves, but we, we saw it carry through, I mean, in our time, I mean, the SEAL Team Ten.

• 2:47:13Ben Milligan?

  I mean, they came to the, you know, rescue of, you know, their SDV squad.

• 2:47:20Ben Milligan?

  The, uh, uh, Gold Squadron SEALs, I mean, they, they were on their way to, you know, come to the aid of Army Rangers.

• 2:47:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:31Ben Milligan?

  Were they in trouble? Yeah. Was it dangerous? Yep. Are you gonna go? We sure are.

• 2:47:36Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 2:47:42Ben Milligan?

  I don't know, I mean, it's, if Americans are in trouble, I mean, you're gonna go.

• 2:47:48Jocko Willink?

  Um, I mean, that's, you know, when you start talking about Tommy Norris and his activities.

• 2:47:56Ben Milligan?

  Yeah, I mean, that's, that's, that's exactly right. Like you, I mean, how much did Tommy risk, uh, you know, to come to, to rescue somebody he never knew? I think 11 other Americans had died attempting to, uh, to rescue, you know, those, those two, you know, the pilot and the navigator. Uh, he, um, and not, I mean, he had, you know, he was there with, uh, his Vietnamese Rangers. Okay, I mean, like, the thing that never, you know, ceases to amaze me is the fact that the SEAL Teams were the recipient of all of that accumulated knowledge, of all that, um, of all that legacy, you know, you know, Darby's legacy and the Cabana Twin legacy

• 2:48:39Ben Milligan?

  and the Pointe de Hawk, all that, you know, all that knowledge got compressed into the Ranger School and they're no Rangers. So the SEAL Teams became the biggest, uh...

• 2:48:51Ben Milligan?

  You know, collection of Ranger School graduates in the US military. And then, you know, not only, you know, is there that connection with Tommy Norris, you know, leading Vietnamese Rangers, but the SEALs and the Seventh Platoon SEALs during the Tet Offensive at Mito, Bob Gallagher leads a squad of SEALs, you know, through the streets of Mito to help call in airstrikes for the stranded Vietnamese SEALs or Vietnamese Rangers. But yeah, Bob Gallagher, Tommy Norris coming, you know, risking everything and he and his

• 2:49:30Ben Milligan?

  Rangers had undergone, you know, a pretty, pretty terrible mortar attack the night before he went out on that raid or went out on that rescue mission. I don't, I can't remember off the top of my head how many of his Rangers were killed in that attack, but I mean, combat ineffective. He only had a handful of Rangers left and him and Kit, you know, still decide, there's an American in trouble, we're going to get him. Just remarkable to me. It goes out and talking to, so you asked the question, how do you compress, you know, essentially with a three-year period of history into a single, you know, 15-page chapter?

• 2:50:15Ben Milligan?

  And, you know, you have two of, you know, the most, you know, iconic SEAL missions of the war that occurred during this period, or not two, but multiple. I mean, you've got, you know, Bob Carey's mission, you've got Tommy Norris's mission, you've got Thornton's mission to rescue Norris. At some point I had the idea, like, I can't cover all of that. And it's not, not necessarily, it's not outside the scope of what I was doing, but it's redundant to what I've already shown. So I don't need to do that. But I do want to cover it and some, and, you know, pay it a nod or, you know,

• 2:50:51Ben Milligan?

  Describe it in a way that other folks probably haven't. And I had read, you know, the books on Tommy and Mike Thornton, and I'd read the book on Tommy rescuing, or the most recent books on those events. And the things that I noticed that they didn't cover were the Medal of Honor ceremonies for each event. And I thought, wouldn't that be an interesting way to, you know, wrap up the book with this, with Tommy Norris's Medal of Honor ceremony? Because Mike Thornton's Medal of Honor ceremony happened several years earlier. Tommy's doesn't happen until 1976. Vietnam War is over, fall of Saigon has happened. You can capture all of this here, this history that's happened if you,

• 2:51:34Ben Milligan?

  you know, use that, that moment as a vehicle. So that's what I did. And I, I contacted, you know, Tommy Norris, and he was, you know, who I, I, Mark Robbins, who was on that deployment, lost his eye to a machine gunner's bullet. Tommy had been, Tommy had helped counsel him through, you know, the, you know, losing the eye. And so Mark had Tommy's phone number. So I just cold called him one day, got him on the phone, and had a, you know, kind of a series of talks with him. But he just couldn't have been, you know, just a more accessible,

• 2:52:17Ben Milligan?

  more, more friendly guy, just a humble, humble guy, you know, considering everything he's been through, everything he's done. And, you know, what was funny is, he always, you know, he, he didn't minimize what he, I mean, he did minimize what he did, but he also, like, was so proud of, you know, his post-war, you know, career in the FBI. He had this, like, I mean, he had a, he had a, I mean, in addition to his, you know, SEAL career, he had this legendary FBI career. He was, you know, he was a undercover agent. He was going after international terrorists as an undercover agent. And his, his, his cover was that of like a, a one-eyed arms dealer. And nobody ever doubted him. He was

• 2:53:02Ben Milligan?

  a, he was, you know, he went after white supremacists in Idaho. He, one of the best stories that I, I heard about him was that.

• 2:53:13Ben Milligan?

  He was up on a wire and he'd been listening to this white supremacist for a few months. And he knew that this guy one had this, this big rottweiler that it was his pride and joy. He loved this dog. And he was taking him to the vet for some, you know, not, not serious issue, but he was going to leave the, the dog there overnight. So Tommy, you know, having listened to this guy's voice for like a month, he could imitate him pretty well. So the night that the dog was there, Tommy makes a phone call to the vet. He's like, hey, while the dog's there, why don't you go ahead and neuter him?

• 2:53:49Jocko Willink?

  [growling]

• 2:53:53Ben Milligan?

  I don't know if it's true. I don't know. I don't know if this is an accurate story, but this is all, it didn't get in the book because I couldn't verify it. The other story that I heard, and this was from a Vietnam era SEAL who was one of the first team leaders at HRT. So he had, Tommy wasn't one of the founders of HRT, but he was one of the plank owners. He was one of the first guys to go through the HRT selection. And so HRT was in, they were conducting one of their very first operations in 1985. It was against a, or they were trying to apprehend a Puerto Rican nationalist who had semi, it was essentially,

• 2:54:37Ben Milligan?

  it was a terrorist. But they were conducting a, I believe in an arrest warrant, and they were going up this guy, the stairs to this guy's house. He leans over the balcony with a machine gun and stitches the entire assault team and shoots one operator in the eye. They, the team backs out and, you know, Charles or Sandy Prudy, who's a Silver Star SEAL himself, the, the team leader for, for HRT, he's trying to, you know, come up with a plan to go in and get this guy. Tommy comes running up to Sandy. He goes, Sandy, I got a plan to get, get this guy. He's like, all right, Tommy, what's the plan? How about I run upstairs and kill him?

• 2:55:16Jocko Willink?

  Check. Freaking outstanding. I don't know if we could find a better place to wrap it up than that.

• 2:55:32Jocko Willink?

  The book is awesome. You know, we've been in and out of different stories. We're not even touching what's in this book. This book is just absolutely filled with incredible stuff. It's incredible story. So, get the book. Echo, you got anything?

• 2:55:53Speaker 02

  I don't.

• 2:55:54Jocko Willink?

  You sure?

• 2:55:55Speaker 02

  I'm sure.

• 2:55:56Jocko Willink?

  All right. Ben, I've kept you captive. Speaking of hostage rescue, I think you're gonna get busted out of here in a second. Somebody's probably looking for you. So, appreciate you coming.

• 2:56:08Ben Milligan?

  I can't thank you enough. This is a treat for me. Anytime I get to talk about this stuff is great. Thanks for the support of the book too. This is...I can't thank you enough.

• 2:56:21Jocko Willink?

  Well, the amount of effort that you put into this book, the product is just outstanding. And I can't even fathom that there would be someone else that would go through the effort that you did to do this. You know, you're like, you got issues, dude.

• 2:56:38Ben Milligan?

  Yeah, no, that's true. But so do you.

• 2:56:42Jocko Willink?

  Oh, I do too.

• 2:56:43Ben Milligan?

  No, I mean, you think about it like, leaving the teams is a traumatic event. That's traumatic, which you have proved. Look at this. Look at the, I mean, the infrastructure that's surrounding you at this point. You have to do something to account for that trauma. And I always used to think that I was immune to, you know, leaving the teams and I was never going to, you know, fill it with anything else. And, you know, I'd never gotten any tattoos. I'd never, you know, I didn't get into triathlons or anything like that. I just had this huge blind spot creeping up on me that I didn't even know about. And, uh, once this thing found me, I mean, I was hostage to it.

• 2:57:27Ben Milligan?

  Like, there wasn't anything, I mean, it was, it dominated my life. I mean, it was, you know, I'd try to really, you know, curtail the amount of time that I put into it. I'd only work in the morning and work in the evening, you know, after the kids were in bed. But what I found was that I would leave off writing or researching. And then throughout the day, this thing would just be on a loop in my head and I couldn't break away. And it was like that for 10 years.

• 2:57:55Jocko Willink?

  When you, when it got published, were you already thinking about your next book? Or were you just like, you know, I need a breather?

• 2:58:02Ben Milligan?

  So I, when I was writing the book, I had kind of a, I was, if I wasn't thinking about a paragraph or a specific, you know, issue, I had this sort of mental loop going on in my head. And it was always like, what's the point, what's the point, what's the point, what's the point? What's the point of this book? What's the point of this chapter? What's the point of this sentence? What am I doing? What, what's the point? What's the point? What's the purpose? And that, that question was always on a loop in my head. And then when I turned the final manuscript in and I was done and I didn't have that question to think about, I, I was a little lost. And I found myself like, I took a walk in my neighborhood and I was just, and all of a sudden I found myself

• 2:58:45Ben Milligan?

  sort of subconsciously thinking, I started to say, what's next?

• 2:58:51Jocko Willink?

  What's next? What's next? What's next?

• 2:58:54Ben Milligan?

  And I just, and I just, and I've fortunately, through a lot of counseling, through some distance from the book, I've been able to, you know, take a, take a pause. And I kind of gave myself, you know, mentally a year, you know, from the date of publication. Until, you know, so for me, year, so July 20th is when it came out. I'm giving myself till July 20th of 2022 before I really start, you know, buckling down or start beating myself up about what's next.

• 2:59:25Jocko Willink?

  I'm a psycho because when my, once I get done, as soon as I get done and turn the final manuscript.

• 2:59:34Jocko Willink?

  Well, first of all, before that even happens, I'm already plotting. I already got that next book. One of them is bubbled to the surface and I'm ready to rock and roll. And so by the time the book comes out, when I, when I, when one of my books gets published, the other one is already, it's already being formulated and kind of being written, which is really annoying. Cause I also have like the repeat loop in my head like, oh, this could be good, this could be good. And as soon as that, I go, there's no, there's no moment to go, ah.

• 3:00:04Ben Milligan?

  No, no, no.

• 3:00:06Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. So.

• 3:00:07Ben Milligan?

  I mean, there was maybe a, uh, an afternoon. I did reward myself at the end of each chapter. I would get, I would get drunk.

• 3:00:16Ben Milligan?

  And I, I wouldn't go out drinking or anything like that. I never did. I would just.

• 3:00:20Jocko Willink?

  When you got done with the chapter, would it be like, that's the rough chapter? Or is that like, hey, I mean.

• 3:00:26Ben Milligan?

  Yeah. It was the first draft. I knew that I was coming back for it.

• 3:00:29Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:29Ben Milligan?

  Um, but I, I mean, just getting, you know, you know, putting that flag in the ground and being like, I'm done with that chapter. Like I felt like, you know, even if I knew that it wasn't perfect, even if I knew if I was going to have to come back, at least I knew.

• 3:00:40Jocko Willink?

  The meat was there.

• 3:00:41Ben Milligan?

  Meat was there. The content was there and, and I, if I had let myself, you know, get that far, then I knew what the point of the chapter was. I knew why that chapter was important and I knew the point that I was trying to make. So at least I had the, you know, the bones of the chapter. The structure was good, you know, whether or not I was going to come back and add stuff on, you know, the, uh, the, um, the Cuban frogman or something like that, or, um, uh, gosh.

• 3:01:07Jocko Willink?

  Where are you leaning towards your next book? You must be, you must have an idea in that.

• 3:01:10Ben Milligan?

  I have an idea, but it's very private.

• 3:01:13Jocko Willink?

  Private. All right. You said, no one's going to steal any of your ideas.

• 3:01:17Ben Milligan?

  I, it's not that.

• 3:01:17Jocko Willink?

  Cause no one has enough time.

• 3:01:20Ben Milligan?

  It has nothing to do with that. It's that I need, I need that in my head. And I, if I say it out loud, for, for whatever reason, it will, it'll be like, um, I, I need the motivation of it. I need the, the unfinished, uh, quality of it to, to motivate me to.

• 3:01:35Jocko Willink?

  That's, one thing I noticed is in, uh, SEAL training.

• 3:01:41Jocko Willink?

  Uh, guys that were like saying like, oh, I'm in SEAL training. I'm in SEAL training. I'm in SEAL training. Those guys like didn't seem to make it.

• 3:01:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:01:48Jocko Willink?

  So maybe it's the same kind of thing for you. You don't want to get it out there because that's.

• 3:01:51Speaker 02

  I don't.

• 3:01:52Jocko Willink?

  It's almost like you get rewarded for it. You get a little mini reward when someone goes, oh, wow, that sounds awesome. You already got paid. You're not allowing yourself to get paid. That's a good move. I like it.

• 3:02:02Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 3:02:02Jocko Willink?

  I like it. Don't allow yourself to get paid, man. Don't go credit. Don't take credit. So you're not even taking any credit from me, from Echo. You're just taking nothing from us.

• 3:02:10Speaker 02

  No, I just.

• 3:02:10Jocko Willink?

  You have to earn it over here.

• 3:02:12Speaker 02

  What's in here?

• 3:02:12Jocko Willink?

  I was gonna say, because no one's gonna take your idea about some random document written in nineteen fifty-three about some, you know, new nuclear warhead that led to whatever.

• 3:02:25Speaker 02

  How'd you know?

• 3:02:26Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, there you go.

• 3:02:29Jocko Willink?

  Well, awesome, man. Thanks for coming down. Um, you're welcome back here anytime. I've, I've got some ideas in my head for like some kind of a something to do with some sort of podcast scenario with you. I don't even know what it is yet, but.

• 3:02:40Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:02:41Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:42Speaker 02

  Agree.

• 3:02:42Jocko Willink?

  We'll work something out like that. Uh.

• 3:02:45Speaker 02

  I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm committing.

• 3:02:47Jocko Willink?

  Oh, right on. See, well, you know, I kind of feel like I already did it because I just said it. So it's kind of like I got the reward. Hey, I can just move on now. You know, it's pretty much done. Uh, hey, if you want to support this podcast, get some Jaco Fuel. We supported this podcast today. You're racking and stacking some Jaco Fuel. It's been a long day, even for Echo Charles, who's usually in the cruise mode over there. Are your vocal cords tired?

• 3:03:07Speaker 02

  I handled it. I handled.

• 3:03:09Jocko Willink?

  Uh, get some, get some stuff from JacoFuel.com. Get some milk. I'm so, see, see, we haven't eaten today, so my milk detector is high order right now. It's super hype right now. I don't want anything else. I don't want a steak. I don't want a cheeseburger. I don't want a turkey leg. I want milk right now.

• 3:03:28Speaker 02

  Plus, as far as your macros go, you're gonna need that help this late in the day.

• 3:03:32Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. Did I go catabolic earlier?

• 3:03:34Speaker 02

  You're, you're risking that big time right now.

• 3:03:37Jocko Willink?

  We're not gonna let that happen. When you get home, we get some milk, milk up in the system.

• 3:03:41Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 3:03:41Jocko Willink?

  And so we're good there. So check that out, JacoFuel.com. Go to, go to Wawa if you want to get some of these drinks. That are freaking awesome cuz you know, did we get jittery today? Did I get jittery? Did you get jittery? No, you felt smooth all day.

• 3:03:55Speaker 02

  They're good for you too, by the way.

• 3:03:57Jocko Willink?

  Good, 100% good for you.

• 3:03:58Speaker 02

  You're not gonna pay any price in the future.

• 3:03:59Jocko Willink?

  Are you thinking you're gonna get like type 2 diabetes cuz you drank some sugary drink? Cuz you're not cuz that's sweetened with monk fruit right there.

• 3:04:06Speaker 02

  It's true.

• 3:04:08Jocko Willink?

  That's what I'm talking about.

• 3:04:11Ben Milligan?

  I mean, this is my first energy drink.

• 3:04:13Jocko Willink?

  Ever?

• 3:04:14Ben Milligan?

  Yeah, ever. I don't think I've ever had a. Uh, no, yeah.

• 3:04:18Speaker 02

  Damn, good move.

• 3:04:19Jocko Willink?

  That's weird. What'd you drink in Iraq?

• 3:04:21Ben Milligan?

  Coffee.

• 3:04:22Jocko Willink?

  Oh, okay. Yeah, that'll do it. You're a coffee guy. Uh, light of a shop too. OriginUSA.com. If you wanna get some jeans, if you wanna get a belt, if you wanna get a wallet, if you wanna get a pair of boots, if you need a jujitsu gi, jujitsu's going high right now. It's going high order. Everyone's training. Right? You feel it?

• 3:04:43Speaker 02

  I feel it.

• 3:04:43Jocko Willink?

  The whole world's training. You training, Ben? Training the jujitsu?

• 3:04:46Ben Milligan?

  No, I don't have time.

• 3:04:48Jocko Willink?

  You freaking sitting in an archive somewhere with your nose in a book, dude.

• 3:04:53Ben Milligan?

  I mean, for all the fans out there, yeah, I'm training a lot.

• 3:05:01Jocko Willink?

  OriginUSA.com. Go get yourself some cool stuff. All that is made in the United States of America. Look, we spent trying to fight communism. We, we, we, we fought against communism and we're still fighting against communism, but it's, it's not in the jungles anymore. Right now, it's, it's, it's in, it's in your wallet. You can give your money to a communist country, literally. You can do that. I recommend you don't. I recommend you don't give money to communism. I recommend you give it to democracy and America and hardworking American people. So we're talking about OriginUSA.com. Go get some freedom, son.

• 3:05:42Speaker 02

  As opposed to supporting uniquely affordable labor.

• 3:05:46Jocko Willink?

  Oh, that's what they call slave labor. That's what they call slave labor.

• 3:05:50Speaker 02

  True.

• 3:05:51Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, we're not down for that cause.

• 3:05:53Speaker 02

  Also, Jaco's store.

• 3:05:55Jocko Willink?

  Boom.

• 3:05:56Speaker 02

  Represent. We're on the path. We're working out. We're lifting. Sometimes we wanna represent. You want a shirt that says discipline equals freedom on it. A hoodie, hat.

• 3:06:04Speaker 02

  The word good.

• 3:06:06Jocko Willink?

  Shirt locker.

• 3:06:06Speaker 02

  Shirt locker.

• 3:06:07Jocko Willink?

  Shirt locker, that's a uniquely. Unique.

• 3:06:11Speaker 02

  Unique.

• 3:06:12Jocko Willink?

  Sometimes. Talks himself into a corner, no escape.

• 3:06:15Speaker 02

  No red, no such thing, no such thing. Either way, the what that is, it's a different, unique shirt with nu- unique designs, very um.

• 3:06:23Jocko Willink?

  Unique.

• 3:06:25Speaker 02

  Good feedback on those ones. Good feedback.

• 3:06:28Jocko Willink?

  What's the latest? Can you say what the latest was? What was the last?

• 3:06:32Speaker 02

  The, this past one, it's April right now, so March was the one that you came out with a long time ago, everybody must get stoned.

• 3:06:39Jocko Willink?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:06:40Speaker 02

  That one was controversial.

• 3:06:41Jocko Willink?

  Ben, controversial.

• 3:06:42Speaker 02

  Controversial.

• 3:06:43Jocko Willink?

  I made it, we made a shirt, so I heard from the NOM guys, one NOM guy in particular was like, yeah, he went to get his gun from the armory after he had been home. And he went to check out his weapon, someone else had taken it to Vietnam, his stoner came back. So a guy took his stoner on deployment, did a six month deployment, came back, when he went to pick his weapon up from the armory, etched in the buttstock, it said, everybody must get stoned. And I was like, that's the best thing ever, you know, the stoner machine gun, if you don't know, uh, the stoner sixty-three. That's what the, that's what a lot of guy, a lot of SEALs carried in Vietnam. And it's a badass weapon, so we made that t-shirt. So you could get a cool t-shirt like that, some people didn't like it, huh?

• 3:07:24Speaker 02

  Well, they.

• 3:07:25Jocko Willink?

  They're scared.

• 3:07:26Speaker 02

  They, they were, they.

• 3:07:27Jocko Willink?

  They were thinking we were talking about the marijuana.

• 3:07:29Speaker 02

  They, they were sensitive to the controversial nature.

• 3:07:31Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, some people don't like marijuana, some people don't like guns, it.

• 3:07:35Speaker 02

  It's true.

• 3:07:35Jocko Willink?

  You know, they had more to do with guns than marijuana, had actually nothing to do with, well.

• 3:07:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:07:39Jocko Willink?

  You hate a lot of folks.

• 3:07:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, the friction point was the marijuana, not the guns.

• 3:07:44Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:44Speaker 02

  That's my feedback.

• 3:07:45Jocko Willink?

  Don't you feel like you're kind of in a stoked situation where someone's like, oh yeah, bro? Everyone must get stoned, but what's the gun? Well, it's a stoner sixty-three, NOM, what?

• 3:07:56Jocko Willink?

  It's a conversation starter. Anyways, Shirt Locker, if you want to get cool stuff, check it out, jocko store.com. Subscribe to the podcast. Subscribe to jocko underground.com. So we can be standing strong in the event of a total meltdown of our democratic society.

• 3:08:12Speaker 02

  Also with that, and you know, that is true. That is true. But you get life advice every week from Jaco. Brad, tell me, come on, every week, life advice. You need life advice. Boom, ask Jaco every single week.

• 3:08:24Jocko Willink?

  I answer questions. I answer all the, there's like a special way to contact us. If you're part of the, of the Jaco Underground, then you can submit questions. We're answering them. So get some of that YouTube. We got a YouTube channel. You can see the videos that I am the assistant director of, therefore they are awesome. And even the ones that Echo just works on by himself are okay.

• 3:08:44Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 3:08:44Jocko Willink?

  Uh, psychological warfare, flip side canvas Dakota Meyer. He's got cool stuff to hang on your wall. Dude, if we made a, if we made a Ben Milligan t-shirt, what would it be?

• 3:08:54Ben Milligan?

  Oh, I mean, you'd sell a dozen.

• 3:08:58Ben Milligan?

  Can you imagine?

• 3:08:59Jocko Willink?

  I wonder what could we do? What would it be?

• 3:09:01Ben Milligan?

  It'd have to, I mean, how pale am I? It'd have to be something like to capture, you know? This is as tan as I am. This isn't black and white. It only gets worse. If a shirt comes off, it's only worse.

• 3:09:13Jocko Willink?

  So it'd have to be something super white.

• 3:09:16Ben Milligan?

  Yeah, yeah. You're just like, vague outline.

• 3:09:20Jocko Willink?

  Do like, do like a white t-shirt with like a white on white.

• 3:09:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, with like gold in like, yeah.

• 3:09:27Jocko Willink?

  And then it could just say Mulligan.

• 3:09:30Speaker 02

  We'll come up with something that's good.

• 3:09:32Jocko Willink?

  You'd be surprised, man. People would be stoked to represent. They'd be like, oh yeah.

• 3:09:39Jocko Willink?

  Books by, by water beneath the walls. Again, bruh. I know you like the title. I get it. I get it. Next time you're going to title a book, just come and consult. Come and consult.

• 3:09:52Ben Milligan?

  You got it.

• 3:09:52Jocko Willink?

  Come and consult. Hit me up. Let's spend a 15 minute conversation. There's a beautiful, a beautiful and amazing and powerful and strong context behind that title that four people get.

• 3:10:07Jocko Willink?

  And it's, and, and it is, as I said, this is to me, the most important historical book about the SEALs. And I'm gonna also say for me, the most important historical book about special operations. And you write about everyone in there. The Rangers, the Special Forces, the Scouts and Raiders, it's all in there. It's just an outstanding book. So pick up that book. Buy Water Beneath the Walls. You know what? Do me a favor right now, as you're listening, write this down. Buy Water Beneath the Walls, because there's no way you're gonna remember that title. So there you go. Hey, I've written a bunch of books too. Final Spin,

• 3:10:48Jocko Willink?

  that's, that's the novel that I wrote. Leadership Strategy and Tactics Field Manual, The Code, The Evaluations Protocols, Discipline vs. Freedom Field Manual, Way of the Warrior Kid 1, 2, 3, and 4. Get those books for the kids that you know. Please, please do that. It will legitimately guaranteed make their lives better, make them better into better human beings. Make them more capable for the world. And the world is not an easy place. Mikey and the Dragons. Get that for the little munchkins running around the house. About Face, Extreme Ownership, Dichotomy Leadership. Check out those books as well. Echelonfront.com if you need some help with leadership inside your organization. Online training at ExtremeOwnership.com.

• 3:11:31Jocko Willink?

  This is not the only place to learn leadership, and leadership is not an inoculation that you get and now you're good to go. You gotta train just like the gym. That's why we got ExtremeOwnership.com, so we can train you every single day. And you wanna ask me some questions, go on there. I'm on there. I'm on a Zoom call, talking to me. I'm five inches away from your head, answering your questions. If you wanna help service members through an incredible organization, go to AmericasMightyWarriors.org. It's Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee.

• 3:12:00Jocko Willink?

  Helping in so many different ways. Uh, she's tremendous and it's a tremendous organization. Don't forget about Horses and Heroes, Micah Fink, Horses, Heroes and Horses.com.

• 3:12:11Jocko Willink?

  Micah Fink, he's doing cool stuff on horses, running, riding horses through the wilderness. Forty-one days, legitness. Um, we're on social media. We're right in there, inside the algorithms. Don't get sucked into them. I'm at Jocko Willink. Echo's at Echo Charles. Ben is at?

• 3:12:33Ben Milligan?

  B Milligan three on Instagram and then Ben H Milligan on Twitter.

• 3:12:37Jocko Willink?

  What do you post on Instagram? Anything?

• 3:12:40Ben Milligan?

  Yeah, I post on there. I'll, I'll try and put on like a post a week. I'm not, uh, I'm not super active on it. I don't, I'm not super good, uh, but I'll, if I'm, um, usually I try and tie something back to, you know, uh, American history or something like that. I just, I was down at, uh, the World War II museum, um, which is incredible. Um, there was a, uh, right outside the World War II museum, there's a statue of Anne Frank and they just happened to position it, uh, directly in front of a shell-pocked, uh, section of Utah beach that they had brought back. And that seemed like a, wow, just incredible, like, um, it just, I mean, it made the whole, the whole effort, the whole thing seem worthwhile, like,

• 3:13:26Ben Milligan?

  what do these guys do? And what did they do it for? It's right here. Everything's right here.

• 3:13:30Jocko Willink?

  Awesome. Cool stuff. So check out his Instagram and, uh, Ben, thanks once again for coming on. I really appreciate it. Appreciate it.

• 3:13:38Ben Milligan?

  This is fantastic.

• 3:13:40Jocko Willink?

  Appreciate what you've done for the teams, uh, not only through your service in the teams, but also for this book. And thanks to all the military personnel out there that are writing history as we speak, by keeping us free around the world.

• 3:13:56Jocko Willink?

  To the police, law enforcement, firefighters, paramedics, EMTs, dispatchers, correctional officers, border patrol, secret service, all the first responders. Thank you for what you are doing right now to keep us safe here at home. And once again,

• 3:14:14Jocko Willink?

  There are opportunities out there. But they're not gonna just, they're not gonna beat down your door. You gotta look for them. You gotta, there's an expression we used to have in the teams. Look for work. Remember that expression? Look for work. So when you're a new guy and you're hitting a target, a training operation, and you don't really know what to do, so you're kind of standing there with your weapon at Highport, not doing anything. And some freaking platoon chief is gonna go, "Hey, Willink, look for work." And that means you pick up your weapon and you go look for an angle to cover. Well, that's what you, that's what the SEALs did. That's, that's where we came from. We came from a position where we were just out there looking for work. Don't do what everyone else is doing.

• 3:14:56Jocko Willink?

  First of all, don't just stand there and do nothing, but don't just do what someone else is doing. There, it's already getting done. Look for the angle that's not being covered. Look for the job that no one else wants. Look for the job that is harder, that's more complex, that's cold and wet and miserable. The job that requires more effort than anybody, anything else, and more than anybody else is willing to put up with. That's where the opportunity is. And then go and get after it.

• 3:15:29Jocko Willink?

  And until next time, this has been Milligan and Echo and Jaco. Out.